


Walkabout

by Tassos



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Healing, Ice Nation - Freeform, Journey, Post-Mount Weather, Post-Season/Series 02, Season/Series 02, Storytelling, The 100 Big Bang, Trikru, background Clarke/Bellamy - Freeform, background Clarke/Lexa, living with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 07:26:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4171134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tassos/pseuds/Tassos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Clarke walks away after the fall of Mount Weather, she doesn't know where she's going or where she'll stop. She just keeps going, trying to find the lost bits of herself along the way. But the forest isn't empty, and Clarke runs into various grounder units heading home -- who slowly learn and spread the story of how she destroyed the Mountain Men. Traveling among a people celebrating the actions that tore her apart, Clarke tries to reclaim who she was in the face of her new found fame. Along the way, she relearns what it means to be a healer, trades stories with the grounders to try and make sense of everything, and comes to terms with the who she is and who she needs to be to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. She Who Wanders

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to spatz for plotting help and queenoktavia for beta reading.
> 
> Written for the100bigbang on tumblr, though no art.

_But the Mountain Men didn't know how to fight the sky. They didn't know what to make of the stars that fell. No one on the ground was prepared for Klark of Skaikru._

_\-- from The Fall of the Mountain_

* * *

When you don't know where you're going, going is easy. One foot in front of the other. Eyes on the ground watching for roots. Nothing but the sound of your own footfalls, maybe some bird songs to keep you company, maybe some breeze on your cheeks. 

Clarke has walked forty miles already. She's going to walk forty more. One foot in front of the other. Her feet hurt, because she's been walking forever -- the grounder horses had been nice, but she doesn't want to think about them.

She thinks instead about how her feet hurt. How they feel pounded and bloody, though she knows that they will be pink and pale if she stops to take her boots off. But they should be bloody. Clarke should be bleeding. That's how she feels anyway, like she's bleeding and she can't stop, no matter how much pressure she puts on the wound. 

But she keeps walking. Keeps putting one foot in front of the other. The forest has closed around her. Some of the leaves are turning colors -- the rich greens fading into yellows and soft reds that fall beneath her boots like so much blood on the ground.

That's all she sees on the trail in front of her a she plods along, mud from the recent rain trying to slip her up. She stutters and slides to the bottom of one hill, catching her balance on a sapling, almost toppling over. As soon as she steadies her feet, she presses on, needing to put another forty miles behind her before she bleeds out.

Maybe it's not that she's bleeding, she thinks after scaling another hill, another slide to the bottom of the other side, but that she's been drained dry. All that's left is a shell that doesn't know how to stop.

What if she stops? It's a thought that tugs at her. She doesn't stop right away, not then, not for another endless string of hills, miles more beneath her feet. She doesn't stop because she's afraid of what happens then. She's past the point of knowing what comes next, of seeing over the next hill, of thinking three steps ahead, of asking what if.

What if she stops?

So Clarke does.

She stops, and she stands still, and she closes her eyes, and she breathes.

Birdsong. Golden leaves rustling in the breeze. Cool air on her cheeks and at the corners of her eyes. She breathes.

When she opens them she's alone in the vast forest, a tiny person in a sea of trees. She's alive. She's crying.

* * *

Exhaustion is a funny thing. Clarke knows she should stop. Rest. She _wants_ to. But there's this stubborn little place inside her head that has no idea _how_. 

She doesn't know when she last slept. She doesn't know when she last sat down. Days. 

Hours ago, she'd arrived at Camp Jaha after walking since dawn. Last night, she'd been inside the Mountain. Just hours before that she'd been marching at the head of an army. She can't think about that right now, but it's all she can think about, as the light fades and the shadows lengthen into dusk.

Her calves and thighs ache from all the hills, her feet are beyond sore, she's hungry. Worse, she's thirsty, and she doesn't know where the nearest stream is. So she keeps going. Strains her ears listening for the sound of running water, and follows the trails down, down, down hill, like she herself is flowing water, following the path of least resistance. 

She doesn't dwell on the thought, but she lets it carry her. She lets it be easy for once. 

She's walked forty miles today, and she'll walk forty more tonight. One foot in front of the other, stumbling over roots and stones she can't see as the last daylight disappears, until finally, finally she hears the shush, shush of water rustling over rocks.

The tree line ends abruptly, and the river stretches wide and far, cutting its path from the mountains.

Her knees land badly on the river stones, which grind through the thick fabric of her pants, now damp, but Clarke doesn't care as she drinks. The water is sweet.

She drinks and drinks until she collapses backward on the knobby bank, her aching legs tucked awkwardly underneath her.

Above her stretches the sky, black as black in the dark of the new moon, the only light the pinpricks of the Milky Way, cutting the sky in half. She could get lost looking at all those stars.

But her thoughts land on her father.

What would he think, if he could see her now?

_Maybe there are no good guys._

He was a good guy. He would have found a way.

He would have found a way.

* * *

In the cold light of dawn, the old drop ship camp looks how Clarke feels: burnt to ash, faded of life. She killed three hundred grounders here. She and Bellamy lost eighteen of their own before that. They've lost another forty-two since.

She walks across the bare ground, wondering why it isn't soaked in blood, wondering if the forest will ever be able to reclaim it.

It's a dumb thought, and Clarke shakes her head at herself as soon as she thinks it, because of course the forest will come back. The human race dropped nuclear bombs on itself and the forest had come back. And so had the people.

Clarke doesn't need to worry about it. The drop ship still has a few supplies, maybe, which haven't been scavenged. She can sleep inside until she figures out her next move.

But she stops when she sees the smudged chalk outside the door. The letters aren't any more legible than they had been weeks ago. _Has it only been four weeks?_ Worse really, but she can still make out the C of her name. Instead of a message, it looks like her mark. Her drop ship. Her decisions.

Levers and doors, that's what it always seems to come down to. It had been that way on the Ark. It's still that way here on Earth. 

Killing people should be harder than pulling a lever.

Inside, the drop ship feels more like home than it should. But the last time she was here was the last time Finn was free, so she doesn't have to worry about any comforting feelings. She kind of hates that she wants the pain, that she embraces it as her due.

She doesn't know what it feels like not to hurt anymore. She wonders if this is what becoming numb is like.

She finds the blankets they brought on that last desperate trip, one crusted with her own blood. She climbs to the upper levels and finds a dead light and, on the top level, the shock baton her mother used to restart Lincoln's heart. It still works, and for a moment, Clarke considers leaving her gun, but that's stupid, and no matter how much she hates herself, she's not suicidal.

They saved Lincoln. After torture and betrayal and even shooting him herself to kill that mountain soldier who'd had him by the throat in the hills above Tondc. She's not sure when he became hers. Maybe when he became Octavia's. It's a blurry line that only gets blurrier when she tries to untangle it.

She stays on the third level to sleep, curls up by the crates, and even though the new day is starting, she drops off quickly.

She's walked another forty miles from the river. Her last thought before losing consciousness is that she needs to learn how to swim. Right now she's drowning.

* * *

Clarke stays at the drop ship for a week. She scavenges in the woods for berries and nuts. This close to winter, not much is left, but enough. She goes to the river and uses the shock baton to stun fish and then scoops them up. After making a fire and eating them right there on the shore, she strips off all her clothes and risks river monsters for a few minutes to rinse the dirt and blood from her hair.

The water is bitingly cold, like a thousand tiny pinpricks that make her chest constrict, makes it hard to breathe, but she stays in for as long as she can because Clarke finally feels _clean_.

She goes back to the drop ship and curls into her blankets and sleeps and sleeps.

When she wakes, the sun isn't where she expects it to be, and she's not sure how many days have passed.

Sleep was one of the few things on the Ark that they could prescribe in abundance. Clarke goes down to the second level wrapped up in her blanket and looks out the hole that Murphy blew in the wall.

The sun is shining. It's almost enough to make her smile.

After a few days, the downside of enough sleep is that after scrounging up more food, Clarke gets bored. Her thoughts aren't a pleasant place to be. She sees where she saved Jasper's life, and she sees the accusation in his face when he looked at her over Maya's body. She wonders how he's doing.

Hunting is a good distraction. Clarke's not very good at it, especially since she doesn't want to waste bullets, but she gives up when she does find tracks -- she's hit with the memory of Finn so hard she has to sit on the ground for a minute, struggling not to cry, until she remembers that no one is around to see, and she lets out a choking, ugly sob, then another. 

She cries, and snot runs down her nose and gets on the hair that falls around her face. She cries till her stomach hurts and her head pounds, until there are no more tears, no more anything, until she's empty.

It should be harder, killing things. 

She's lost her appetite, so she sits until she can breathe again, and then pushes to her feet and goes back to the drop ship to munch on the last of the sour berries.

She thinks her mother would have something to say about eating enough, but Clarke doesn't care and goes to sleep hungry.

* * *

Clarke leaves the drop ship with as much idea of where she's heading as she had when she left Camp Jaha. Moving feels better than sitting still, though. One foot in front of the other. And leaving the drop ship lets her leave the memories behind.

She feels guilty about it, like she's abandoning everyone all over again -- the death she's dealt, Clarke doesn't deserve a break. But she's not one of the good guys, so what does it matter if she gives herself this one kindness?

After the first two days, time becomes a blur of sunrises and sunsets. She stops worrying about how long it's been, and she doesn't have time to worry anyway, because hunting down food becomes more and more of a preoccupation. 

Hunger, like exhaustion, is a funny thing, looming larger and larger -- large enough to push away the thoughts of blood for a while. She has two blankets with her and a few other odds and ends. Each evening she stops early enough to build a small shelter to keep out of the wind, but the nights are cold and frost covers the ground when she wakes from a frigid, restless sleep. More and more of her days are spent trying to hunt and gathering what she can to eat.

Surviving doesn't give her a lot of time to think.

Still, she almost can't eat the first rabbit she snares. _You die, so I might live_ , she thinks when she takes it from the loop and snaps its neck with a sharp jerk. _You die, so I might live._

Hunger wins, but she buries its bones.

* * *

She runs into grounders a few days after she kills her second rabbit. She hears them before she sees them -- someone is screaming in pain; it sounds like they're dying. Their cries echo through the wood.

Approaching cautiously, Clarke has her gun in hand, but she doesn't raise it when the first scout sees her. Instead she raises her hands, the gun held loose in her palm, as another warrior joins the first.

She's not sure if they recognize her, but she says, "Ai laik Clarke kom Skaikru," squaring her shoulders. She keeps her eyes off the arrow trained on her.

The second grounder frowns at her, but the first lowers his bow. They share a glance and then nod at her to follow them. Clarke holsters her gun and does, picking her way through the trees to where they're camped.

They're obviously traveling, a unit of about three dozen broken off from Lexa's army. They have a cart stained with blood, a pair of horses to pull it, and another half dozen mounts hobbled near-by. Three tents are set up in the trees, with the banner of the Ice Nation planted in the ground nearby. 

The screaming is coming from the largest tent in the center, but the sentry ducks into the left-most tent, emerging a moment later with a young man with dark hair and a grey faded coat who acts like he's in charge.

Clarke is pretty sure she's seen him before, but she doesn't think they were ever introduced.

"Clarke of the Sky People." He nods at her. A small crowd has begun to gather, but so far no one has drawn their weapons.

"Hi," she says.

"I am Atohl," the leader introduces himself. He gives Clarke a considering look, eyes raking her up and down. She keeps still and steady, conscious that the alliance died when Lexa took Dante's deal. Her gun is a heavy weight where she's tucked it in her belt, and even though part of her wants to reach for it, she's outnumbered here.

But Atohl doesn't seem inclined to kill her. "You're alone?" he asks.

"Yes."

"We didn't expect you would survive. Did Octavia make it off the mountain?" 

His question surprises Clarke at first, but also places him in her memory -- he was at Tondc. He'd helped Octavia dig out survivors. He was in charge now because he was second to his commander who had died in the missile strike. Clarke swallows down the guilt, her head stuttering as she nods.

"Yes. Octavia's fine. She made it. She's back at our camp with the rest of my people. From the mountain. We got them out," Clarke clarifies because fuck them, they walked away and she still got her people home, even if she destroyed her soul doing it. She sees the moment it sinks in across Atohl's face.

"Out of the mountain?" he repeats, stupidly, with a half a frown and a good heap of disbelief. She hears murmurs from the others gathered around.

It puts Clarke's back up, and she stares Atohl down. 

"Yeah, out of the mountain."

"How?" he asks, unable or unwilling to believe her.

"I . . ." Clarke falters. Takes a breath, then says steadily. "I killed them all."

She can't tell if he believes her or not, but whatever he sees in her face -- his confusion disappears, his jaw firms and he nods to her again, something like respect in his eyes.

"Jus drein jus daun," he says.

"Jus drein jus daun," Clarke repeats, like a prayer, like it was inevitable, like she hadn't pulled the lever.

She feels the weight of all the grounder eyes on her, and this time she meets them, scanning the crowd to see their reactions. She doesn't know what she expects; these are the last people who would condemn her. Part of her still thinks they should. But the few nods she gets from these warriors are cautious. Not all of them believe her, but they don't gainsay her either. For now. They're wary, and she wouldn't put it past some of them to attack her.

"You are welcome to stay with us the night, Clarke of the Sky People," Atohl says. "We won't be moving until the wounded are ready to cross the Lake."

"The Lake?"

"The Fire Lake. North, northwest of here. Our lands are on the far side."

Clarke nods. Still so much to learn about the ground. "Thank you. I appreciate your hospitality."

The moment stretches when no one moves, turning awkward, and Clarke almost asks whether she should find a bare piece of ground or if the offer includes space in a tent. Thankfully another pained cry from the central tent breaks the growing tension. Everyone winces, and the scream dispels the others until only Clarke and Atohl are left.

"Meara is changing the bandages on the ones who were burned at Tondc," he tells her by way of explanation. "She thought they might live . . ." Atohl looks like he doesn't know if he made the right decision to let her try and heal them. Even though he's probably her same age, he's looking at Clarke like she might know the answer.

"If she thinks there's hope, then I'm sure there's hope," Clarke says. "I was training to be a doctor, a healer, before we came down here. If I can help at all . . ."

Atohl gestures for her to go into the central tent, following her inside.

It's dark after the brightness of the sunshine, and Clarke's eyes take a moment to adjust. A tall woman with her hair completely braided back, like Clarke's mom used to keep hers, kneels on the ground beside her patient, a younger woman with bandages up her left arm and side. The healer is changing one of the dressings, and Clarke can see raw burned skinned underneath.

Atohl waits till she's done and looks up at them, her face expressionless as her eyes flick up and down Clarke. 

"This is Clarke of the Sky People," Atohl introduces her. "She says she was training to be a healer and offered to help you. This is Meara."

"You are the war leader," Meara says, her tone casual, her eyes assessing.

"I was."

"What do you know of healing?" The words cut, like they were meant to, and Clarke can't even fault her for it, after what she's done. The guilt floods her, hitting her as suddenly and overwhelmingly as a solar flare. If she looks at her hands, all she'd see would be blood.

She swallows down the lump in her throat but her voice cracks anyway. "I was learning before we came down. I'd like to learn again."

Maera is older than Clarke's mom, with the years etched in the crows feet and furrows on her brow. She fixes Clarke with a long stare, which is hard to hold. Clarke doesn't bother trying and lets her gaze drop to the burned girl, who is awake and watching her too. She wants to say, _I'm sorry_ , but the lump is back and she's not sure she won't start crying if she speaks again.

"If you want to learn, you will do what I say," Meara says. "You ever treated burns before?"

"Yes," says Clarke, nodding. Electrical burns for the most part. Fingers, hands, one case of electrocution. Nothing like this. Nothing from fire.

She goes to Meara's side when she beckons, stripping off her gloves and coat to clean her hands from a jar of alcohol. She listens as Meara points out the bandages and ointments on the ground beside her. None of the names are familiar, but focusing, remembering, Clarke had always been good at that, and she forces herself to clear her mind of everything else.

"You ready?" Maera asks the warrior-girl who hasn't taken her eyes off Clarke since she knelt down. The girl nods, and Maera moistens the next strip of bandage on her upper arm with warm water and gently pulls it back. It still sticks, and the girl cries out. Her back arches, the arm twitching in aborted, painful movement.

"Hold her," Meara orders, but Clarke's not sure where, so she quickly scoots around to the girl's other side and presses down on her collarbone just past the bandage edge. She takes the girl's good hand in hers.

"What's your name?" Clarke asks.

"Klia," the girl breathes through clenched teeth and closed eyes.

"Look at me, Klia," Clarke says, leaning over her. "Look at me. Squeeze my hand." The girl turns toward her, eyes opened to slits, and then Meara's done, the bandage is off, and she gets to breathe for a moment.

Meara looks at Clarke through the hair that's fallen loose from her braid, and Clarke doesn't know if it's approval or not on her face, but she doesn't tell her to let go. She carries on, tossing the bandage into a wooden bowl and picking up a knife that she sterilizes in the brazier beside her. 

Meara talks to Klia when she starts cleaning the wound where flecks of dirt had gotten beneath the bandage, telling her what she's doing, that Klia's strong, she can bear the pain, it'll be over soon. The whole while Clarke holds Klia's shoulder still, and Klia holds Clarke's hand like a lifeline.

The burn ointment is a thick, translucent orangey-yellow syrup that Meara calls honey. She spreads it sparingly over the exposed area, and Klia finally relaxes. Then the bandage goes on, and Meara lets her rest for a moment before the whole process starts again on the next bandage down her arm.

As she holds her still again, Clarke can feel three ragged bumps of scarred skin beneath her palm on Klia's collarbone. She wonders what they are for a minute before remembering that's how grounders mark their kills. 

Klia has killed three people, whose existence was burned into her skin so she would always remember. As if it would be possible to forget. How much of her own body would be covered in tiny scars if Clarke marked all her dead? _Enough to make constellations of them,_ she bets, but Clarke pushes the thought away as fast as it comes. She doesn't have time to think about it.

Clarke falls into a rhythm with Klia. She starts humming snatches of songs, she takes over explaining what's happening when Meara encounters a particularly stubborn piece of dirt that wiggled under the skin at Klia's wrist. Clarke doesn't know how long they work with her, redressing her arm, but when Meara says, "It's done. We're done now. You'll have a nice scar to tell a story about when it's done. But now rest," and Klia lets go of her hand, Clarke feels bruised. When she tries to stand, pins and needles assault her legs.

Meara gives her a moment to rub circulation back into her ankles, then sends Clarke for more boiled water. Klia's burns are the worst of those who survived, but there are four more in the tent who need seeing to. More burns, burns and a broken arm, and two with infected burns, one of whom has Meara shaking her head and plunging her knife into the fire before cutting away the rotted flesh from his thigh. 

The young man, Hastings, screams despite his brave face, and Clarke wants to look away, but she's lying across his chest to hold him down and she caused these injuries, this is her penance, so she doesn't look away.

He's the last and when it's done, Meara gives him a slug from the corked jar of alcohol and then passes it to Clarke. It's finer than what Monty cooked up back at the drop ship, but still stings going down.

"Come. Time to clean up." Meara gathers her tools and ointments, and Clarke picks up the spent bandages. The sun is high in the sky when they go outside to the fireside. Meara gestures at a second leather bucket to boil water for the bandages. They get to work silently, and that's just fine with Clarke. She remembers doing similar tasks on the Ark except they'd used the autoclave to heat steam instead of boiling water. 

"You did well," Meara says after a few minutes.

Clarke looks up. The older woman is sitting on a log sorting her tools into a roll of leather. She hasn't put a coat back on and with her sleeves pushed up, her forearms are ropey and strong. She glances at Clarke as she works.

"I lost my apprentice to the missile. For all that these great big warriors can deal a killing blow they can't stomach the aftermath."

"I'm sorry." Clarke returns her attention to the boiling pot of bandages.

"Sorry they lose their stomachs at the sight of peeled skin?" Meara says lightly, startling Clarke into looking up again.

"Sorry for -"

"I know what you meant, Sky Girl," Meara says, and the little humor that had been on her face drops away. She sighs. "He was a good student. Quick. Steady."

"I wish I could have done . . . something." Clarke stops herself this time, the confession on the tip of her tongue, but she holds it in. 

Meara holds her gaze for a moment, then nods once. "The Mountain Men sent the missile. What's done is done."

_But I could have gotten him out_ , Clarke thinks.

"He survived for a few hours," Meara goes on, attention back on her kit. "But he was too far gone. It was kinder to send him on his way." She looks up, and her eyes are sharp again. "I hear you did that for one of your people, the one who massacred Tondc. Before the heda could carve justice from his skin. That right?"

Clarke can't meet her eyes, hiding behind her hair. "Yes."

"Just as well," Meara says softly, almost kind, and Clarke sneaks a glance at her. A sad smile flickers across her face before her attention moves on to her ointment jars, wiping the outside of them clean.

"I saved his life once," Clarke says, and she's not sure why. If she burned a mark into her skin for every person she'd killed, Finn's would be right over her heart.

Meara looks up again, which Clarke takes as a sign to keep going. "He got stabbed in the ribs with a poisoned knife. I didn't know what I was doing and when I saw him, I thought this is it. I'm gonna lose him," she laughs a little, but it comes out more than a little thick. "He was my friend. He made me a little metal necklace of a deer with two heads, and he was the one who wanted to make peace with you all. He was so scared of dying alone." 

Clarke risks another glance Meara's way, ready to see scorn on the grounder's face, but Meara is simply watching her, listening, unreadable. Clarke doesn't know why it feels so important that Meara understands. She can still feel the cut of Lexa's rigid words while her eyes held compassion.

"We were able to get my mom on the radio -- she's our doctor. I was training with her. This was all before they came down, the first time we talked to them, and she talked me through getting the knife out and stitching him up. But he kept burning up, because of the poison, and it was. . ." She shakes her head, brushes away the tear that slides down her nose. "Anyway. We got the antidote for the poison." Clarke doesn't dwell on that particular shame, focusing on stirring the bandages in front of her. Lincoln's had been the first burns she'd treated on the ground. "But for a while I didn't expect him to wake up. I was afraid that I'd let him die."

"You loved him."

Head bent over the bucket, Clarke presses her lips together, unwilling to breathe lest she lose it right there. She nods, feeling raw and exposed, and unable to hide herself again. 

She wants to tell Meara that Finn was the first one who gave her the stupid princess nickname. He was the first one to volunteer to go with her to Mount Weather, when they still thought that it was safe. When he looked at her it was as if she was the sun in the sky. Clarke hadn't always liked that, in fact, most of the time she'd hated it -- he'd loved her and hurt her, but after a certain point all that mattered was that they were both alive, until that too fell to ash.

"Joel, my apprentice," Meara says after a moment. "He was my son. It was his first war campaign."

At her quiet words, Clarke flinches, the tears blinding her and falling into the pot water. But she wipes them away and faces Meara. She owes her that much. 

"I'm sorry," she says again. Meara nods once, and their eyes hold, and Clarke thinks that understanding doesn't make it hurt any less, but sharing grief with a stranger is easier than with friends.

* * *

Near twilight, when the work is done, and Meara has checked on everyone one last time, they join the gathering at another fire set in a wider stone circle with a spit across it. The grounder hunters had found more than rabbits, and while Clarke can't tell what it once was, the four-legged creature drips fat and smells divine. Her mouth waters, and somehow she waits patiently next to Meara till it's cooked and carved and Atohl hands her a slice on a bark shingle.

Clarke forces herself to eat the first bite slowly, then gives up and falls on it hungrily. She catches Meara raising an eyebrow at her but it's not like she's eating with a fork, knife and china plate either.

The thought gives Clarke pause, remembering the china plates in Mount Weather and their fancy foods and sweets. Their sugar. 

Before coming to Earth, up on the Ark, sugars to Clarke had always meant the building blocks of food -- glucose, transformed through the Krebs cycle into energy. Soy tofu pellets, lettuce, Swiss chard, peas, radishes. Apparently the Garden used to grow cabbage, too, before a blight killed the crop. Her mom had liked cabbage. Clarke wondered if they still grew it on the ground.

Meat had been a revelation. Berries were the first sweet she tasted on the ground, very different from the mild sweetness of peas. Chocolate cake had touched some primal nerve as it melted on her tongue. Clarke doesn't think she'd ever be able to eat it again without choking on it.

Atohl comes and sits beside her after everyone begins to slow down. He offers her a bottle of what is undoubtedly more bad hooch, which she accepts. It's the same as Meara's and still stings going down, but Clarke's grateful for it.

Atohl huffs a laugh at the face she makes. When she passes the bottle back, he takes a swig before passing it on to the guy on his other side.

"So, Clarke of the Sky People, tell us how you killed the Mountain Men," he says.

The request has Clarke blinking at him, but she's not surprised. She's been half waiting for this moment since she arrived. She's not sure where to begin, but looking around the fire at the dozen or so Ice Nation warriors with their fierce tattoos and the echo of Lexa's story of their queen in her ears, she's knows she can't be anything but strong.

"We went in through the tunnels, me and Octavia. That was the original plan for the rescue and that's what we fell back on. Bellamy -- he was our spy we sent in -- and a few of my people who had escaped when the Mountain Men rounded them up let us inside."

All the grounders are watching her, and the only other noise is the crackle of the fire and the wind in the trees. 

Clarke takes a breath, trying to think. 

"We found one of their leaders, Dante. He was an old man and unarmed. He'd helped us before but he refused to help us again, so we took him prisoner. He was the one who made the deal with the Commander. He gave up your people in exchange for keeping mine."

"What did they want them for?" Meara asks.

That's when Clarke realizes that these were the foot soldiers who had followed their leaders into battle with blind trust. Followed Lexa's orders. The orders she gave because of the decisions she and Clarke made.

"You know how the Mountain Men captured your people? They couldn't survive in the radiation out here like we can, and they used your blood as medicine. They strung your people up and drained their blood until the person died. Then they threw the bodies down a chute for the reapers. I was a prisoner there with my people at first. That's how I escaped when I found out what they were doing, along with Anya."

That was the first time she heard the words the grounders say for their dead, when Anya broke the neck of the poor guy they'd landed on out of mercy. 

She shakes the memory away, getting back to the story. "Our blood processes radiation better, because we grew up in space, but our blood wasn't enough. They needed our bone marrow, where blood cells are made. Our bone marrow was a permanent cure that would let them leave the mountain. And to get enough for all their people they needed to take so much from us it would kill us. So that's what they were doing. They'd rounded up all my friends and only a few of them had escaped when Octavia and I got there.

"Because of the attack, when we killed the generators, all the Mountain Men had retreated to one level inside. So when we found Dante -- he'd been treated with bone marrow from one of my people already -- we took him prisoner and went to the control room."

She sees a few frowns and wonders if they know what that is.

"They had cameras in there, ways of seeing all the rooms at once from a distance," she gets a few nods, and Clarke reminds herself that just because technology was scarce didn't mean that they didn't know about it. "From there we saw where they were holding my people -- in a big room that had been the dormitory. They were chained to the walls, and in the center was a table where their doctors were drilling into them one by one. Drilling into their bones to extract the marrow."

Clarke closes her eyes, but it doesn't block out the sight of Raven screaming soundlessly.

"We could also see where all the Mountain Men were. Men, women, children. They were all in their dining hall, playing music and games. Eating. Some of them had tried to help my people -- they didn't think it was right what their leaders were doing."

She doesn't know who any of them were except for Maya. She supposes she might never find out.

"Dante wouldn't tell his son, who was in charge, to stop killing us and let us go. Without our bone marrow they'd be trapped inside the Mountain forever. When I threatened to kill Dante if they didn't stop, his son didn't believe me. So I killed Dante. Then, since we were in the control room, and we now controlled the doors to the air outside, I threatened to kill all the Mountain Men if he didn't stop. He didn't believe me then either. So I opened the doors to the outside air and killed them all."

She stops talking. The only noise is the spitting and crackling of the fire. Clarke watches the flames flicker, endlessly changing.

"I killed every last person, even the children. Even the ones who'd helped us." Her voice cracks a little, and Clarke has to stop. She stares at the fire like it's a lifeline, unwilling to crack in front of these grounders. She has to be strong. She has to be strong so they don't kill her, but being strong sometimes feels like suicide instead.

"Good." Atohl's voice is firm in the quiet, and it takes all Clarke has left to keep herself from crying. 

She doesn't bother looking at him, but after a long moment she can't help sneaking a glance at Meara. The healer is watching her, her face difficult to read, especially in the flickering light. She nods when she catches Clarke's eye, but Clarke doesn't know what it means. If it's approval, she doesn't want it.

"So there was no battle?" One of the warriors across the fire asks. He doesn't sound very impressed. "Their soldiers didn't attack you?"

"They didn't know we were there till it was too late," Clarke says pointedly, and because Atohl had asked about her earlier, she adds, "Octavia was on level five trying to find another way to get my people out, in case we failed. She fought off all the soldiers in her way."

Atohl smiles. "She's fierce, Octavia."

Surprised at the compliment, Clarke asks, "How did you know her?" grateful for the chance to change the subject.

"I didn't think much of her when she showed up as Indra's second," Atohl says. "But after the missile fell, and the sniper was picking us off, Octavia kept her head about her. She yelled and cursed at the rest of us, till we did what she said. We couldn't get to the people trapped inside the meeting hall rubble. Octavia took a swig of my dandelion wine and then threw it at a fire --whoosh!" Atohl throws his hands up. "The fire went up, and we had a smoke screen to make the run."

A few of the others around the fire laugh, enjoying Atohl's theatrics.

"I didn't want to like her for that," he says to Clarke. "But then she yelled and cursed some more until we were digging rocks and rubble out by hand. She never got tired, all that day. And when she did, she just cursed and yelled at the rest of us and went back for more."

What he doesn't say, but it's in his voice, is that he couldn't let Octavia of the Sky People show him up. It makes Clarke smile because she knows how fierce Octavia is, what it's like to be on the other side of her rage. She doubts Octavia will ever forgive her for Tondc, and Clarke doesn't blame her. She deserves her hate for what she let happen there. Octavia, Klia, Hastings -- they all deserve better.

"I'm glad to hear she made it out of the mountain alive," Atohl says. He holds out the bottle of hooch to Clarke again, and Clarke freezes in the middle of reaching for it.

_She almost didn't_ , Clarke almost says without thinking about it. Octavia had been surrounded on level five, and that's when they'd done it. 

She takes the bottle from Atohl and takes a swig. The burn of the alcohol has her pulling another face that makes the grounders laugh. Around her, they start telling other stories of pig-headed warriors who needed someone to curse them into moving in the right direction. One suggests Clarke should loan them Octavia for a week to deal with them. They laugh and avoid talking about the dead and wounded, or of the mass death that haunts them all. 

After a few minutes, Clarke has the burning urge to yell at them for it, a fierce anger of her own that doesn't understand how they can be so casual about it all. Don't the dead deserve better?

"Come. I'll show you where to sleep." Meara is suddenly towering over Clarke, standing between her and the fire. Clarke ignores the hand she offers, but follows her between the tents and through the trees to where supplies have been stacked, including Clarke's blankets that she'd left in the central tent earlier.

Once she's gathered them up, Meara leads her to a banked fire nearby where a few others are already asleep. She sets out her own bedroll and blankets, and Clarke does the same. For a few minutes, her hands are busy.

"It's hard to hear stories of death, when it's all you've seen for a stretch," Meara says out of nowhere. She sits on her blankets but doesn't seem ready to close her eyes.

Clarke spreads her hands across her own blankets one more time as if they really need smoothing. But she can't look up without giving away the roil of emotion she feels just under her skin. She wants to lash out, but she doesn't know who she hates more, the laughing grounders or herself.

"I've got so much blood on my hands, those are the only stories I know anymore," Clarke manages to say evenly, finally glancing up, but she can't stand the look on Meara's face that reminds her too much of her mother. 

"Are they?" Meara says mildly. "Your friend Octavia is alive. So are your people. I'd say that was a story of life winning. You clearly thought them worth saving to do what you did."

Clarke doesn't say anything. She doesn't know anymore.

"Some say that a healer's hands hold life in the balance," Meara continues. "We fix hurts and take away pain when we can. But we also hold death in our hands. A warrior's aren't so different."

"I'm not a warrior," Clarke says. Not for the first time she hates the decisions she's been forced into. "I'm just a girl."

Meara huffs a bit of a laugh that surprises Clarke into glancing over at her. "I think we all know you aren't _just_ anything, Clarke, Heda kom Skaigedakru." 

A dozen responses run through Clarke's head -- _why not? It's not fair. She didn't ask for any of this._ Except Clarke already knows it's not fair. She didn't ask to lead; she took charge with warriors at her back and a plan in front of her. She's her own worst enemy.

And yet, she thinks as she lies down and pulls the blanket over her, if she had it to do all over again, she'd make the same decisions. She hates herself a little bit more for knowing that.

* * *

Clarke stays with the Ice Nation group for a few more days, helping Meara with the wounded and listening quietly to the warriors telling stories at dinner around the fire. 

The second night, one of the young warriors asks Clarke about what it was like inside Mount Weather before she escaped, and she tells him about the illusion of safety they cast and the remnants of the old world they kept. She's not sure why he wants to know until the next night around the fire when he looks right at Clarke before saying to the others, "Tell me if you've heard this one.

"Once there was a mountain which was the entrance to the dark underworld, where monsters with two skins lived. An old grandfather ruled them with a kindly smile. They had pretty music, pretty pictures from the Old World on the walls, fancy foods the kind you've never tasted. But if you ate their food you were doomed to stay. If you slept in their beds, you would fall into a drugged sleep, and when you woke, it would be screaming because while they ate cakes and cremes by day, by night the two-skinned monsters feasted on the blood of our people. And no blood was sweeter than the blood of a thousand children caught out after dark.

"Now it wasn't like folks didn't know about the two-skinned monsters. They did. They told their children to stay in at night. They kept sentries around their villages and lit fires to keep them away. But the monsters were cunning. And once they had tasted our blood they would sneak in the night and steal our people away. It would take the spirit of a mighty warrior to repel them."

"Thossus," another warrior murmured. "Thossus," echoed another. Clarke glanced around. Everyone was listening to the storyteller with an intense focus.

"Thossus," the storyteller resumed, his eyes returning to Clarke, who felt caught in his stare. "After the monsters first emerged from the mountain, the greatest warrior of the Twelve Clans, Thossus of Aiskru went to turn them back. He mustered a great army, carrying the old weapons of his grandparents, great hulking grenade launchers and machine guns that fired bullets so fast they couldn't be seen, only felt when their enemies lay dead at their feet. Thossus marched on the mountain to turn back the two-skinned monsters and seal them forever inside the underworld.

"But even he was deceived by their nature. He saw their cruelty and knew they must be stopped. He saw their frailty and thought they were weak. But the monsters were not weak. They were cunning. They drew Thossus into a trap, and when he confidently stepped into it, they rained fire and destruction onto our entire people, a fire so high is burned for weeks, destruction so vast you couldn't see it's far edge. The Fire Lake. That was all that was left of where our people once lived."

The storyteller pauses, and the silence holds a beat before Atohl says, "Emo gonplei ste odon."

"Emo gonplei ste odon," others echo.

"Emo gonplei set odin," the storyteller repeats. "The great warrior Thossus was dead. But not his spirit. His spirit was too strong to kill. The spirit of his people was too strong to wipe out. Ice kills fire.

Clarke feels her breath catch in her chest when she realizes. When Lexa told her about the legend of the first missile attack. Clarke doesn't have to imagine what it was like. _None of the people gathered at this fire do,_ she thinks, as the memory of the missile strike on Tondc comes thick and fast. The searing heat of the fire and the burning horse, the scent of ash and roasting flesh, the cotton that filled her ears after the explosion, her mother's face, Octavia's streaked with blood and soot, Lincoln's when he told her to kill him too. Lexa, calm and stoic, accepting death as easily as breathing. 

Clarke can't think about Lexa right now. 

She pushes to her feet and and away from the campfire. She doesn't hear the rest of the story in her need to get away, find air she can breathe. But all the air around her tastes like ash.

* * *

On the fifth day, Atohl tells her they're leaving to join another of their units as soon as the scouts get back. She thinks he means from scouting ahead, but when the two men and two women return later that morning, their eyes searching out Clarke where she's waiting for a bucket of water to get to a rolling boil on the fire, she understands that they were scouting Mount Weather.

They look spooked, and their eyes keep tracking her until she disappears from their view back into the tent.

Atohl doesn't offer for her to come with them, and Clarke wouldn't have accepted if he had. But he does give her a long knife and a couple days worth of food in thanks for her help. Clarke helps Meara move the wounded to the carts and helps pack up the tent and supplies.

Clarke doesn't know what prompts it, but she's anxious for the them to leave. Every time she turns around, she swears someone else is looking at her. It makes her movements jerky, as her attention leaps to every movement out of the corner of her eyes. She has to take a moment while she's pulling together her things to press her hands against the dirt. They're trembling and she can't get them to stop.

_Pull it together,_ she chides herself. _You've faced down an army of grounders_. It's true, and it steadies her for a little bit as she bolts all her feelings inside. But unlike before, when she faced Lexa and Indra after Finn's death, Clarke feels her emotions bulging through the seams, unwilling to be neatly tucked away. The grounders had been a faceless army before, now she knows their names, she's listened to their stories. She fights the urge to cry while she finishes the rest of her packing.

When everything's ready, Meara shakes her hand the grounder way, by grabbing her wrist, and says, "I hope you find what you're looking for, Clarke of the Sky People."

"Thank you. I hope your people pull through." Clarke forces a smile. "Safe passage on your travels."

She stands by the doused fire pit and watches them ride away. When she can no longer hear them, she turns her back to the sun and starts following her shadow till dark.


	2. Roads Not Traveled

Clarke doesn't stop walking till dusk. She's not sure how far she's gone -- _forty miles, give or take_ \-- and she's not sure where she is. She's far beyond the familiar territory around Mount Weather, the drop ship, Camp Jaha, Tondc. Being lost makes her a little nervous -- _how will she find her way back?_ \-- but it's also a relief -- _it's not her fault if she never finds her way back_ \-- so she presses on.

Early in the afternoon she leaves the densely packed trees of the forest for higher ground where shrubs and scrub cover the steep rocky ground of a mountain thrusting hurriedly into the sky. She's not sure if the trail she's on was made by game or grounders, but so far she hasn't met anyone. The sky is a deep breathless blue that makes air catch in her throat and stick for a moment. At sunset, she reaches the top of the ridge, and one side of the trail falls away into a steep slope that's punctuated by boulders that have tumbled from the top.

She stops and stares at the vast wilderness that stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions. The rolling hills undulate like frozen sea waves, dark green spires dot a wash of deep red, gold, and orange leaves that cling to ghostly branches and mirror the warm glowing orange that streaks across the sky.

It's beautiful. More beautiful than anything Clarke has seen in her life. 

The view fills her up from her toes as she drinks it in. She doesn't dare blink in case she misses a moment of it, and she breathes deeply into the wind that plays with her hair, as if she can breathe the sunset and let it seep into every pore of her body, wash through her, cleanse her. 

When the wind picks up, she shivers and clutches her jacket close around her. It's cold up on the ridge, but she wouldn't be anywhere else.

Slowly the sun sinks below the horizon, dancing colors playing at the edge of the world.

Her ancestors -- _their ancestors_ \-- nuked the world and the world kept spinning. Sunrise after sunrise, sunset after sunset, day after day, until the forest grew out of the ashes, bursting with life. Twisted life, sometimes, Clarke exhaled, her breath condensing in the cold air, but nonetheless, life.

* * *

Sleep doesn't come easy, and it's not just the wind whipping through Clarke's blanket when there isn't much cover to break it. She's wedged herself between a pair of boulders that are trying to leach the warmth from her body. She doesn't bother trying to make a fire in this wind and eats her jerky cold.

She feels the loss of the sun like the loss of a friend, leaving her more alone than ever, with only her thoughts. After the busyness of the Ice Nation camp, the absence of people feels oppressive. It's not silent up here -- the wind won't allow that -- but it is empty. 

Meara's last words to her surface in her thoughts, and Clarke wonders what it is she's supposed to be looking for. When she left Camp Jaha, she just needed to be away. All she could see in her mind were the dead in the mountain. 

Now she closes her eyes and also hears Hastings's screams and sees Klia's stoic courage in the face of their wounds -- they're her fault too. She won't find their forgiveness -- she'd hated hearing their thanks when she said goodbye. She doesn't deserve it. Doesn't want it.

Letting her head fall back against the boulder, Clarke tries to get her muscles to relax so she can simply sleep. She's too tired right now for this, but her mind sticks on the story of the Fire Lake, that burned and burned until the Ice Nation had grown out of the ashes.

Clarke hopes her people will grow out of the ashes too. But her? Clarke is ash.

* * *

The next morning is colder than the night. Clarke dozed a little in the small hours of darkness, exhaustion dragging her under, but she wakes up even more tired. 

She watches the sunrise over the other side of the ridge, bereft and adrift, like she's one of the gray clouds closing in. She's so tired. Soon she will be wet and tired.

When she left Camp Jaha, Clarke could barely think straight, she was so tired. Her heart hurt in her chest. It still does, but now she thinks she can finally feel the broken pieces, charred around the edges. She's not sure they'll ever fit back together. All the pieces are people. 

Her father is an old wound. Clarke can only glance at the sky and wonder what he'd think of her now. _He'd be so disappointed in her, giving in to death so easily_. She should have fought harder to find another way, like he did. But he'd been betrayed too.

Her mother is a new wound, ripped and shredded and patched so many times she barely recognizes it. What does her mother think of her now? Clarke doesn't care -- _a lie_ \-- because her mother doesn't understand -- _except she was on the table, screaming_. It doesn't matter now, because she's forty more miles away, and she'll be another forty by nightfall.

Wells, the kids they lost to the grounders -- _she can't remember all their faces_ \-- the grounders she killed fighting for their lives. Anya, Finn, Lexa -- _she can't think about Lexa_ \-- the kids she left in Mount Weather. Monty, Fox, Harper, Miller, Maya, Jasper. Octavia. They're all dusted by a fine layer of guilt that Clarke is helpless to sweep away. She can't bear to wonder what they think of her. She let them all down -- _she left them there_. She saved their lives -- _she executed an entire people_. She's not sure there's a difference. She's doesn't know which is more important.

The rain starts, and Clarke pushes herself to her feet. It's too cold to sit still feeling sorry for herself, but since no one is around to see she keeps feeling sorry for herself as she hikes down the mountainside. The rain forces her to concentrate on the trail in front of her, helps push the dark thoughts to the back of her mind for a little while. Clarke doesn't worry too much about them. They'll be back.

* * *

About the same time that she runs out of food a week later, Clarke runs into another group of grounders. Only, she realizes after cresting a hill, it's not a small group like the Ice Nation unit. She's come upon half of Lexa's army, sprawled out on the floodplain of a river.

She's immediately recognized by the sentries, who send a messenger to the Commander while she waits on a tree stump at the edge of camp. Her feet are sore and she hasn't taken off her boots in more days than she can remember.

Clarke thinks about walking off before she's _summoned_. A hot knot of anger clenches in her stomach the longer she waits.

Except the commander who comes to _her_ some time later turns out not to be Lexa.

Clarke stands quickly. She recognizes the woman, Boro, one of Lexa's field commanders. She is as tall as her male escorts, with her thick dark hair dreaded back. Around her neck is one of the masks the grounders favor when they want to be especially menacing, but with it down for once, Clarke can see her sharply angled jaw which is set in annoyance. Her long heavy cloak and her armor make her seem more like a disapproving wall of steel than anything else, and Clarke finds herself stretching into her best posture to get an unhelpful extra inch of height.

"Clarke of the Sky People."

"Boro of the Tree People." Clarke inclines her head slightly.

"There was a rumor you were wandering the forest. Did you get lost?" Boro's tone is polite, but her eyes are not.

"No." Clarke smiles back with teeth. "I'm not lost."

"The Commander is a half a day's ride away," Boro says.

"I wasn't looking for her."

"Then what brings you to our camp?"

Clarke finds herself thinking quickly, entirely unprepared for the question. "I was just passing through, and since I'm low on food, I was wondering if you'd be willing to trade me supplies for my skills as a healer. I can hunt for myself," she adds quickly, feeling the weight of Boro's stare. It's nervous babble, but she can't help herself. "But I want to help. If I can."

"We have our own healers. And not so many wounded that we need extra hands," Boro says.

_Of course they do_ , Clarke thinks bitterly. They hadn't actually fought anyone in battle. They'd walked away. She's about to offer a polite and insincere brush off and keep on her way when Boro surprises her by going on.

"But we are of course more than happy to give you provisions and a place to sleep in a tent tonight, Clarke of the Sky People."

Clarke narrows her eyes at the unexpected offer. "Why?"

"We were allies, and you will be our guest now," Boro says, which doesn't answer Clarke's question, but she is already turning and motioning Clarke to follow. Her escort drops to the sides to let Clarke pass.

She takes a jogging couple of steps to catch up. "Thank you," Clarke says, getting a sideways glance and a nod in return, all without Boro defrosting one bit.

Clarke almost wants to smile, if she didn't think that would be a terrible idea right now. She's not sure why she got the offer of hospitality, but she's fairly certain that if it were wholly Boro's idea, she wouldn't have bothered. Clarke isn't suddenly being welcomed with open arms into the grounder fold, and she finds that more reassuring than she should. After spending time with the Ice Nation, she felt welcome among them, and that had sat wrong on her shoulders.

Boro shows her to a tent near the center of the camp that has four pallets inside with packs and gear nearby. A fifth has been fit into the small space between two of the others, a hasty addition. 

Clarke sets her own pack down beside it. The orange blanket she's twisted to hold her few possessions falls open once it's off her back, but other than her gun, knife, and shock baton, which are attached to her belt, Clarke doesn't have enough to be worried about anything going missing. She goes back outside.

"Setts can show you where to wash in the river, if you'd like. He'll help you find anywhere you want to go."

Clarke glances at the escort that Boro nods to. His face is shaved, a tattoo inked along his scalp like Lincoln. He can't be much older than Clarke.

Boro excuses herself, leaving the two of them standing there awkwardly. Setts is staring at her, and she doesn't like it.

"So," she says pointedly. "River?"

The river is the largest Clarke's seen, and from Setts' answers to her questions about the area she learns it bears the same name as Lexa's dead lover, the Costia. It's wider than the river at the base of the Philpott Dam. 

A handful of grounders are washing at the bank -- pots, clothes, and other gear -- but Setts leads her along upstream for a few minutes until they reach a small creek Clarke could leap cross in five steps that feeds into the river. Trees shelter either side, and a barrier of stones a little ways uphill makes a half-foot waterfall that gurgles and splutters. When they go up past it, Clarke sees that the stones also make a small pool, not very deep, but large enough for several people to splash around in.

Clarke pulls off her gloves and crouches at the edge. The tips of her muddy boots get muddier as she dips her hand in the water. It's frigidly cold and feels good.

Glancing over her shoulder, Setts is still staring at her, like everything she does is fascinating, and he doesn't seem inclined to giver her any privacy. Since she's pretty sure ditching her guard will be frowned upon, Clarke just splashes water on her face, scrubbing at it to try and get off some of the dirt from living in the wild for a week. It doesn't take long, and it does feel good, but she's still disappointed when she stands to tell Setts she's ready to go back. Now that water is so close, her skin has started to itch.

Someone calls from nearby. Setts hand goes to his knife, but lazily, like he's pretty sure whoever it is isn't a threat. A grounder warrior, a woman, emerges from the trees. She says something quick and sharp to Setts, who frowns but only gets halfway through an answer before the newcomer snaps something else and shoos him off.

She's dressed lightly, without a coat or cloak over her long sleeves, and she's not wearing armor. Her hair is the same color as Meara's honey, loose except for where it's braided out of her face.

"Forgive him," she says to Clarke. "He is young and dumb as a rock."

"It's all right -" Clarke starts but, the other woman cuts her off.

"You deserve more respect," she says. "At least enough to not have his eyes on you while you wash." She nods at the pool, and Clarke glances at it, understanding now. When she turns back, the other woman has already unbuckled the strap across her chest that holds a bag and sheaths her weapons and is now peeling herself out of two layers of shirts. As soon as her bare belly emerges, Clarke realizes she's staring and hastily looks away, busying herself with shedding her own coat while her face flushes. 

"What's your name?" she asks.

"Echo. Of Aisgedakru."

That gets Clarke's attention. "I was with a group from Aiskru a week ago. Atohl was leading them to the Fire Lake." She glances over again, when she's about to take off her shirt, and finds Echo completely naked. She's half-turned away as she drops her clothes in a pile and her knife point first in the dirt within easy reach of the pool.

Echo catches her eye over her shoulder and gives her a sardonic smile. "You want to know why I am here and not with them?" she asks Clarke's unasked question. "I am the Commander's guest while I recover and give my report."

Looking at her, lithe is the first word that pops into Clarke's head, but then she notices how the other woman's ribs stick out, the knobs on her spine. She hasn't eaten well in a long time and when she straightens up, what stands out aren't the features Clarke would normally pay attention to but the angry red circular wounds on her arms and chest, the deep bruising on her upper thigh from stick marks.

"You were in Mount Weather," Clarke half-asks even though she doesn't need to.

Echo stares back, unashamed and challenging. "Yes," Echo says. "Our scouts say all the Mountain Men are dead."

Clarke tries to act normal and pulls off her own shirt. The wind raises little bumps across her skin. Her throat closes up, and she doesn't want to, but she nods.

They look at each other, and for a moment, Clarke is afraid that Echo will thank her for killing them all, but she doesn't. She just walks past Clarke and into the pool sinking to her knees until she's covered to her chin. Clarke finishes undressing and joins her.

As cold as the water had been on her hands, it's ten times colder on the skin of her torso, the shock cutting like knife blades across her chest and arresting her breathing for a moment. Quickly, Clarke falls back and dunks her head under the water, the world going soft and silent before she bursts back to the surface. It's only about three feet deep, so her knees sink into the muddy bottom.

Echo has also dunked her head and is now running her hands over her skin under the water. There's no soap, but most of the dirt comes off with a little friction, so Clarke starts doing the same. The sensation of her own hands feels odd at first as they run over the ropy muscles of her legs and the sharpness of her hipbones. Clarke has lost weight over the last few weeks, and she feels like she's reintroducing her body to herself.

"They say you were in the mountain and escaped," Echo says after a few minutes of silence.

"Yeah." Clarke turns her head a little. "I was captured with the rest of my people. I found the cages -- your people. I found Anya, who had been trying to kill us just a few days earlier, and we escaped together through the reaper tunnels." That terrifying flight through the dark. "She led us to the dam and we jumped two hundred down into the river. It was the craziest thing I've ever done."

"Crazier than assaulting a fortress that hadn't been breached in a hundred years?" Echo says dryly.

"That was Lexa's idea," Clarke says, even though she'd been ready to go in by herself, more than once.

"But you stayed after the army left," Echo points out. "You should have died. You and all of your people." She offers a partial smile as she says it, softening her words.

"I couldn't walk away from them," Clarke says.

Echo nods, solemn. "I wasn't surprised, when I heard. Almost everyone else was, but I wasn't. I thought, only idiots would be stupid enough to try to take on the Mountain by themselves."

"Your people were supposed to help." Clarke's anger rises swift and sure. "Your commander was the one that ran away."

The disdain on Echo's face does nothing to quench the bitter sting of Lexa's betrayal. For once, Clarke doesn't push the knot of anger away.

Echo ignores her obvious ire. "When the Mountain's soldiers came into the cage room and caught us, it didn't take long for them to put down whatever fight we had," she says. "Your people were frightened children and mine were warriors who'd had the strength slowly sapped from our bodies. We had no weapons, only the hope of a good death, but with their tasers, they wouldn't even let us take that. Your plan for us to fight our way out was a stupid plan."

"So you just gave up? What kind of warrior does that?" Clarke says, and hates herself as soon as she says it because she'd seen the grounders hanging upside down with tubes sticking out of them. She knows that when the body is anemic from blood loss, no amount of willpower can force your limbs to move, especially after sitting in a cramped space with minimal food for weeks or months. Her plan for an army to rise from within had been a desperate plan. 

Echo's lips press together, her eyes going flinty. "You are not one of us. You had no right to expect us to die for you."

"Sorry." Clarke takes a deep breath, trying to calm down. It's hard, and she's fairly certain that Echo is mad enough at her to either leave or drown her. After a long stretch of silence when neither happens, Clarke risks a look over to find her watching. It's unsettling, and Clarke wonders if she thinks Clarke is as monstrous as she feels.

"Why weren't you surprised? That we defeated the Mountain?" she asks when she can take the silence no longer.

"Because once I met Bellamy, I already knew your people were stupid and crazy," Echo says. "And determined. Was it your idea to send him walking to his death?"

For a moment, Clarke's heart stutters, she's so surprised to hear his name. 

"His," she says. "But he didn't go till I sent him."

Echo nods. "I didn't believe him when he said our people were allies. But then he got the soldier's attention when they were going to take me next. I didn't believe he would get free. They strung him up, just like us, and then one of the Mountain girls came in and helped him down, and I helped him strangle the soldier who followed the girl. He fought well. 

"But even when he promised to come back and free us I didn't believe him. I thought he'd die. But he did come back and free us like he promised." The look she sends Clarke is full of regret. "I wanted to fight, even though it was a stupid plan. Did he . . .?"

"He made it out," Clarke tells her, the last of her anger gone. Her thoughts catch on the image of Bellamy hanging upside down like the grounders she'd seen. Of angry red marks on his chest like Echo's. Of his hands around a soldier's neck, so close and personal. He never told her about any of that. On the walk back, he'd only talked about the kids and Maya and the people who helped them, finding Jasper and the others and getting them to safety. 

_What about you?_ she wanted to yell at him now, beat some sense into his self-sacrificing head. She'd come so close to killing him, too.

Clarke shakes off the images. She didn't lose him. "He went in to shut off the acid fog, so we could get the army close. He rescued my people who were being killed inside, when they were trapped. He let me and Octavia inside, after the Mountain Men sent you out."

"He's a strong warrior," Echo says, and Clarke smiles reflexively, glad to hear her approval. "What happened after that?"

Like with Atohl and his people, she wants to know, and Clarke shivers, not wanting to tell. The movement disturbs the warm pocket of water she's kneeling in. Guilt and shame still cut deep, and she's not sure she can tell the story again. But the marks of Echo's captivity are scarred into her skin, and Clarke might not have the right to ask her to fight and die, but Echo has the right to know how her torturers died. Even the ones who didn't deserve it.

"After we got inside we split up. Bellamy suggested we go find Dante, their leader who had helped him before. So him, me and Monty went to find him. Octavia, Jasper, and Maya, the Mountain girl who helped Bellamy escape, went to level five where all the Mountain Men had retreated. We'd blown the generators and it was the only level without radiation."

Clarke watches the current carry sticks over the tiny waterfall because she can't look Echo in the face.

"Dante had the bone marrow treatment, so he wasn't with the others. He kept himself apart because he was the one who made the deal with Lexa to let you free in exchange for betraying us. He let you go and condemned my people to death, and refused to help us. We took him prisoner and went to the control room, where we could see everything. I tried talking to Cage, Dante's son, who was in charge on level five. I tried to exchange Dante for my people, but he didn't think I'd kill him."

"You did."

Clarke nods. "I didn't want to. Then I told Monty to figure out how to open the doors to level five to let the irradiated air in. Cage didn't believe me then either." She finally looks up, and Echo's face is unreadable.

"Bellamy was against killing them all. The children, the people who helped us. He wanted to find another way." Clarke wants Echo to know he wasn't just a killer. "But there was no time. And Cage, he wouldn't listen to any compromise. Raven was on the table, and then he put my mother on the table." 

The words slip out without her really meaning for them to. Clarke closes her eyes. It's the first time she's said them out loud, and the memory _hurts_. 

"He put my mom on the table, and I could see them -- see her -- I couldn't-" Clarke takes a steadying breath, not sure how she wants to take the compassion she sees now on Echo's face. "We had no soldiers of our own to fight, except Octavia, and by then she and Maya were trapped and they were going to kill them both. Opening the vents was the only way to stop them from killing all of my people."

"What did Bellamy do?" Echo asks, the question in the furrow of her brow.

In Clarke's dreams, only her hand is prepared to kill everyone in the mountain. She'd been the one thinking about the worst case scenario for days. She'd been the one to threaten Cage with irradiation. She'd been the one to tell Monty to make it possible. But Bellamy, "He helped me pull the lever."

"So justice was served," Echo says softly. "I thought I would die in there."

"Is it justice?" Clarke says quietly, anger and bitterness returning full force in a split second.

"What would you call it?" Echo asks impatiently. "They captured and murdered _my_ people for three generations. You may have seen the cages once, but you were never in one, waiting for them to take you, or watching the bodies of your friends be tossed like garbage to the reapers."

Chastised, Clarke shuts her mouth. She might never have been in a cage, but Echo will never know the weight of nearly four hundred souls in her hands and her hands alone. She didn't decide who lived and who died. 

But Clarke pushes away the memory of the mess hall. She can't think about them or she'll lose it, and she refuses to break down in front of Echo and cry for the people that tortured her. Clarke has no right to feel bad in front of her. She thinks instead about Bellamy's hand on hers, the memory faint in her mind, wondering why he did it. Why he helped. If it was about more than saving Octavia. It wasn't right that he tried to shoulder this burden, too.

They've been in the water long enough that Clarke has started shivering and can't stop, so she gets out. Echo follows her. She has nothing to dry off with except her clothes, which are filthy, and Clarke desperately wants something clean to wear.

She's distracted when Echo hoots all of a sudden, jumping up and down, dancing and waving her arms to shake as much water off as she can.

"I hate this part," she says to Clarke's wide-eyes, grinning just as suddenly in a smile that lights up her face. _She's beautiful,_ is the thought that hits Clarke, bony ribs, red wounds and all. Uncomfortable with lighter thoughts, Clarke stops staring and does a little dance herself. She squeezes out her hair, and then because she doesn't have much of a choice picks up her clothes.

"Here." Echo is holding out one of her shirts and a pair of pants she'd pulled from her bag. "Go ahead and wash yours. They can dry by the fire tonight."

It's an unexpected kindness, one that brings tears to Clarke's eyes and she doesn't know why. All their talk of death and now she's on the brink of losing it again. She doesn't deserve such kindness.

Dressed in Echo's clothes with her own a wet, mostly clean bundle under her arm, they make their way back to the main camp. Echo delivers her to her tent then says she'll see Clarke later. Clarke, feeling more exhausted than she has a right to, sits for a moment on her pallet, and before she knows it, she's falling asleep.

* * *

Singing wakes Clarke, and for a solid minute she's convinced that she has flipped around in her sleep because the door flap to the tent should be on her left and now that she thinks about it, why are the walls all tan instead of red and white? Then she breathes in and remembers. She's at a grounder camp, not the drop ship where her tent was burned in the ashes of that battle.

She lays there for a minute and listens to the singing that's coming from outside. It's loud and off key and has a catchy refrain that she's pretty sure includes drinking. It sounds like that kind of song. 

She wonders briefly if Bellamy ever got that drink after she left, then decides it doesn't matter, and rolls over to try and go back to sleep. Dozing is all she can manage, however, drifting in and out with the music outside. Her mind drifts, thinking of the Unity Day party, the last birthday she celebrated in space with Wells, her mom's face when she woke up in Camp Jaha. 

Eventually, the scent of dinner cooking has her rolling back into full consciousness. Her limbs feel heavy and her head thick and cluttered, but hunger is a good motivator, so Clarke pushes to her feet. Her clothes are still a wet bundle on the ground beside her, so she gathers those up too before going outside.

Clarke takes a minute to spread her wet clothes on the rocks and logs set up around the fire near her tent before heading to the party at the bonfire. She goes mostly unnoticed in the crowd half a dozen deep. There's easily a couple hundred drunken grounders roaring out the words to the song that has enough English for Clarke to figure out it's a series of bad puns about fucking your enemies. She rolls her eyes a bit and goes to find food and a quiet place to eat. 

She ends up on a log on the outer edges of the crowd, near one of the secondary fires. The night air is chilly, but she doesn't want to go back to her tent alone just yet. Clarke huddles in her coat and her borrowed shirt and lets the noise wash over her. She gets more than a few looks, and the grounders nudge and point her out to each other but otherwise leave her alone.

That's where Echo finds her, four songs later, mind drifting again. Clarke startles at the sudden company and blinks a couple times at the drinking skin thrust into her face.

"Go on," Echo shakes it. "It'll keep you warm."

Gingerly, Clarke accepts and takes a pull of what turns out to be more bad alcohol. It's not quite Monty's engine swill and has no hint of the sweetness in Atohl's dandelion wine. Echo laughs at the face she makes, but Clarke takes another sip before handing it back.

"That's horrible," she says.

"All I could get my hands on." Echo shrugs as she brings the skin to her lips. "My people brew better stuff."

Clarke snorts. "Mine brew worse."

Echo tilts an interested look her way. "Do they sing terrible songs, too?"

"Yep." Clarke even smiles a little at the thought. She doesn't have to wonder how they celebrated coming back from Mount Weather. There would have been an assembly to start with in memory of the dead. Kane or her mom would say something poignant about sacrifice and the price of victory, and then whoever was in charge of the moonshine would dole it out until everyone was drunk and happy. She wonders if Monty would help make it this time. Bellamy would be walking among everyone, making sure they were okay.

"They'd probably be trying to dance by now, too," she says before she can think about Bellamy for too long. "Badly."

"I don't think we have to wait long for that," Echo grins, pointing at a group of men trying to pull others up with them to dance in a line. It's not working out for the dancers or the ones they're trying to pull up with them, and they all fall in a heap to roars of laughter.

It startles a laugh out of Clarke too, and she rolls her eyes again, sharing a look with Echo.

"Fucking Trigedakru warriors can't even piss standing up," Echo tells her, humor lacing the insult.

The attempt at dancing soon turns into a half a drunken fight until a couple others wade in to break it up and shove both sides back into their separate corners. One of them, a woman, yells at everyone to sit down and shut up, and then, instead of breaking up the party like Clarke half expects, she waits till they quiet enough for her to be heard over the remaining noise. Then she begins to speak. After a minute or two, Clarke recognizes the cadence in the foreign words; she's telling a story.

They've been listening for a few minutes when Echo asks, "Do you understand her?"

Clarke shakes her head. She's only learned a little trigedasleng in her time on the ground.

"She's telling about the first time the clans encountered the Mountain Men."

Clarke looks at her sharply, but Echo only gives her a mild glance. "The Aisgedakru led the first attack against them when we discovered what they were," she says proudly.

"The Mountain dropped the first missile on them in retaliation," Clarke says, and this time it's Echo giving her a surprised searching look. "I heard that story."

"Yes." They listen some more. Clarke catches a familiar word here and there, and the storyteller is acting out the parts so she can sort of follow along. The storyteller whistles with her finger tracing an arc from the sky to the ground showing the explosion with her hands and billowing sound effects. 

Echo narrates some of the bits that come afterwards about Castus of Valikru. His people were the Aiskru's closest allies. "Thossus's spirit was too strong to die," Echo says as they watch the storyteller. "After the winter snows quenched the fires, and ice spread once more, Thossus's spirit found new strength in clever Castus. Castus had fought with Thossus, lost his brother and sister to the monsters of the Mountain. He would not let one battle defeat him. He had a beloved son, and would not let him grow up under a bloody shadow."

"He approached the Mountain with a new plan. Instead of an army, he took only the finest warriors. When Castus set off for the mountain his son begged to come too, but his father forbade him. Moving swiftly, Castus and his warriors took the fight to the mountain before the two-skinned monsters could call down more fire. The warriors thought they would win this time. But the monsters had more tricks. In close quarters, their touch drained warriors of their souls, turning them into mindless creatures with blood-smeared mouths, for the monsters gave them the taste of blood."

Here the storyteller takes her hands and runs them with her fingers splayed down over her face. Where she reemerges she has a wild crazed expression on her face that is a parody of normal as she continues.

"Castus watched as one by one his warriors fell," Echo relays. "He fought and fought, but outnumbered, eventually he fell too, his soul stolen from him. The monsters crowed in victory at their prize, and the next night they sent Castus back to his people -- a message and a slave."

The storyteller draws her sword and raises it over her head.

"Castus found his beloved remaining son and delivered him to the monsters' underworld, where they drank his blood and his father feasted on his flesh."

The storyteller slashes her sword downward with a crazed cry, like she's cutting off the boy's life in one dramatic sweep. It happens so abruptly that Clarke jumps.

"And so the Reapers were born."

The storyteller lets the silence settle, until someone in the crowd murmurs something that is picked up by others. Echo says it too. "Emo keryon gon we." 

Clarke doesn't know what it means, but she recognizes the solemn loss tied up in the words.

Echo is quiet for a little while, lost in her own thoughts, as the storyteller continues. She catches up when the veil of poison falls over Trigedakru who live in the shadow of the Mountain. Clarke feels like she's hearing the story through her own veil, twice removed by experience and language. The reapers terrorize the villages, and soon all the weapons of the Old World are stripped from the clans, until they only dare fight back with sword and bow. Castus's spirit is twisted and conflicted, trying to break free of its tortured prison, and when it finally does, it's the only victory won out of a terrible battle before the survivors of the clans are forced to retreat. The days of open battle are done.

A generation passes, as the clans wait for Castus's spirit to heal, to find a new leader. Clarke recognizes without needing translation when at last the spirit finds a young warrior in training. 

"Her dreams were not like those of other children," Echo translates for her. "She dreamed of dark corners, and woke with no fear. She dreamed of blood and death, and woke to spend her days learning to wield them as easily as her sword. She dreamed of the Mountain laying in ruins, and woke the clans to make it happen."

Clarke sits up and watches fascinated as the storyteller chronicles Lexa of Trikru conquering the doubters in her path, and then grabs several people from her audience to circle around her to show the meeting where the Twelve Clans hammered out their treaty. It's eerily reminiscent of the Unity Day pageants Clarke had participated in and watched on the Ark, and she shivers again, because of the sliver of hope hearing the story offers.

But even so, Clarke still jumps a second time when the storyteller suddenly points at the sky, like she had to show the missile, and arcs her finger from sky to ground with another whistle, but this time without an explosion.

Another shiver runs down Clarke's back when she realizes that the storyteller is describing the drop ship landing with the hundred prisoners from space.

A noticeable murmur runs through the audience, and Echo goes silent.

"What is it?" Clarke asks her quietly.

Echo turns toward her, surprise on her face, like she hadn't realized. "The story usually ends with Lexa uniting the Clans. It has a new ending now."

The storyteller says a few words, then, "Klark kom Skaikru," her voice hushed. Her audience is rapt. 

Clarke can't shake the chill that seeps into her bones and rocks her to her core. She stands up.

"Where are you going?" Echo asks.

Clarke shakes her head. She can't be here. "I know how this story ends," she says, before hurrying back to her tent.

* * *

Nightmares keep Clarke awake for most of the night. She doesn't want to close her eyes, even after the bonfire winds down and her tent mates stagger in to sleep. 

She's crying, tears streaming silently down her cheeks and into her ears. She can't stop. It's stupid. There's no reason she should be crying. She feels like an idiot and a little kid, and she hates that she wants to be able to get up and go crawl into bed with her parents. But her dad is dead and her mom is too far away with a hole that was drilled into her leg.

They didn't talk on the walk back to Mount Weather. Her mom had been on a stretcher in the middle of the group with Kane, and Clark had hung back with Bellamy to bring up the rear. She and Bellamy hadn't talked a lot either, but she'd told him more about Lexa and the army. He'd told her more about getting everyone away from Cage and how he nearly blew himself up taking out the acid fog. He'd asked about the missile and Clarke told him about that too. Bellamy had let out a long breath afterward, but his eyes had been kind. "Had to be done," he said. They didn't talk much after that, not until Clarke said goodbye.

She wishes now that she'd said goodbye to her mom too, although she's certain her mom would have made it a hundred times harder to leave. It would have been worth it for the hug.

Clarke rolls over when the memory of Bellamy's hug creeps in on her, trying to get away even though it's impossible to run from memory. After a moment, she gives up and lets the memory settle around her. It's not so much the warmth and strength of his arms, but the expression in his eyes when said, "What _we_ did," full of too much compassion and understanding. 

Did he have nightmares about killing the Mountain Men? Did he see Maya staring back at him?

Of course it wasn't the same. It couldn't be for him. They'd tortured him, stuck him with needles, drained his blood directly from his body and he'd still been against killing them till the end. Clarke had walked into that mountain with death in her hands. She tells herself that's what happened. That's how the grounders will remember her, after all. She would have pulled the lever without him. He wouldn't have without her.

But the same way she can't shake the feel of his arms around her, she can't shake the feel of his hand on hers.

* * *

The summons comes the next morning. Boro and a different pair of warriors are waiting with horses when Clarke gets back from watching the sun rise over the river.

The ride takes half the day, passing through a string of army camps more than forest. Clarke had seen them laid out below the hill before, but traveling through them, she's reminded of just how many people Lexa brought together to take on Mount Weather. Just how much power and strength she squandered. 

Clarke is sore, hungry and cranky when they finally stop. She's been having angry conversations with Lexa in her head for the last hour, and they're all on the tip of her tongue when the tent flap is thrown open and she's face to face with the Commander of the Twelve Clans once more.

"Clarke. We meet again." Lexa stands from her stupid fancy chair when she enters. Her face has no war paint and she seems naked without it, but she still wears her authority as easily as her cloak. 

"Lexa. What do you want?" Clarke pulls herself to her full height. She comes to a stop in front of her, and Lexa waves for her escort to wait outside. 

"I was surprised to hear you were a guest in my camp," says Lexa. "This is the last place I would have thought you'd come. I would have thought you'd be with your people. I heard you rescued them from Mount Weather."

"You mean you're surprised I'm alive after you left me and my people to die," Clarke says, and even though Lexa keeps her face stony and still, she can see the slight flinch in her eyes. Clarke almost smiles at it.

"If I'd stayed and fought, how many warriors would have died against their weapons?" Lexa asks in an infuriatingly calm voice. "More than the number we would have saved. It was smarter to keep my people alive and kill the Mountain Men on our terms when they emerged from their walls."

"So you leave my people for dead. A convenient solution to the problem of dealing with us, too. Sorry for ruining it." Clarke can be cold, too. Standing in front of Lexa again, she's flooded with the same intense desire as she had the last time she saw her to punch her in the face.

"I never wanted you dead. Or your people." Lexa remains calm. "I wanted to defeat the Mountain Men just as much as you."

"Yeah, well, you're welcome."

"So it is true," Lexa says, and there's something in her voice that Clarke can't quite parse, like Lexa hadn't fully believed it until she heard it from Clarke herself.

"Yes." Clarke takes a half step closer, unable to take Lexa staring at her like that. Lexa doesn't budge. "And don't you tell me 'good' or 'justice has been done' or any of that bullshit because we both know it didn't have to happen like that."

"How did you expect it to end, Clarke?" Lexa says gently, and Clarke nearly takes the swing. "We would have rescued our people -- yours and mine -- snuck them out of the tunnels, lost hundreds in the battle, and then let them go on capturing us one by one? We were at war."

"There were children."

"You think they haven't killed children? That the warriors they turned into reapers didn't kill their own families?"

"Then we would have fought them off together!" Clarke shouts, arm swinging wide to gesture toward Lexa's huge fucking army outside of her tent. "Then we would have killed their soldiers in battle until they _had_ to surrender, and I wouldn't have had to _murder_ every last one of them because you couldn't hold up your end of the alliance!"

"I chose to do what was best for my people!" Lexa says harshly, emotion finally cracking her stony mask.

"You left me with no options!" Clarke says.

"You had options. Let your people live or die. You chose for them to live. It was the right decision!" Lexa snaps back, taking a step closer herself. "Now, you don't want to live with the death you caused, but that won't change your choices. That's what it means to lead."

"I don't need a lecture on leadership from you." 

"Then why are you running away?" Lexa's words cut like a knife, slicing through Clarke's anger and leaving it in tatters around her feet. By sheer force of will she holds back the tears that threaten to fall, hating them, hating the sudden swing in emotion from righteous fury to helplessness that she can't escape. It's weak and pathetic and even though she doesn't give one _flying fuck_ about what Lexa thinks, she won't let them fall in front of her.

"You don't get to ask me that," she says through clenched teeth. Her anger isn't that hard to find after all, and Lexa flinches again. This time Clarke has no desire to smile.

They stare at each other for a long moment, the distance between them halved, and Clarke's traitorous brain goes back to the last time they were in a tent this close together. A kiss for a might-have-been, that now would never be. She wonders, briefly, what if they had started something, if they had gotten through the war without the war getting in the way? Clarke wonders if she would ever have been able to let her tears fall, let her guard down, let Lexa in. 

A few brief moments aside, Lexa has put Clarke on her back foot since they met. Clarke's been faking it until she makes herself believe she can hold her own. But she's just a girl, and that girl wants the world where her father is alive and boys and girls with long hair don't break her heart.

But that's not this world. It never has been. In this world, Clarke is a girl who has done terrible things to keep her friends alive. That's who she is now. She will choose them over everyone else.

"Can I ask how you did it? How you defeated the Mountain Men?" Lexa says at last. Her voice is quiet, and it's clearly a question not a command.

"I thought you'd heard. Aren't your people already telling stories about it?" 

"I want to hear _your_ story," Lexa says.

Her story. Clarke hasn't thought about it like that before. It's been _the_ story. What happened. A sequence of events that she participated in, but with Lexa staring at her, Clarke is suddenly back at the moment when Lexa said goodbye.

"I hated you. When you left," she finds herself saying, the spark of her anger rekindling the burn of betrayal. "You and your army ran away. _I_ stayed. I didn't give up. I stuck to the plan and went to find a way in through the tunnels. Octavia didn't give up either and that's where Bellamy and the others met us. Like we planned. _They_ didn't give up either."

"Ge smack daun, gyon op nodotaim," Lexa says softly. Clarke doesn't recognize the phrase and lets it pass without comment.

"We split up. When _my_ people blew the generators, the Mountain Men had to retreat to level five. That's where everyone was holed up except for the soldiers and Dante, who'd all been treated with _my_ people's bone marrow. We took him prisoner when he refused to help. It was his idea to make the deal with you. His son, Cage, wouldn't trade my people for his life, so when he was useless to me I killed him."

For the first time telling this story, Clarke doesn't feel the agonizing weight of her decisions. Staring Lexa down, she is nothing but strong. Clarke did what Lexa couldn't. And after all the guilt and tears, carrying the weight of nearly four hundred souls, Clarke is angrier about that than she thought possible, and it comes out in every clipped word. 

"We were in the control room. We could see everything, including the room where _my people_ were chained to the wall, and we got to watch as one by one the Mountain Men took them and drilled into their bodies while they were wide awake. No painkillers, no kindness. They took Raven. They took my mother. We watched it all from the control room. 

"When Cage refused to negotiate, I ordered Monty to take control of the vents to the outside. And when he'd done that, we let the outside air in, air that was poison to the Mountain Men. Every one of them was dead within minutes. Lincoln mopped up the treated soldiers who made a run for it."

"I heard he'd escaped Indra's camp." Lexa has her inscrutable controlled expression back on her face.

"He's the only grounder I can trust," Clarke says. "He's one of mine now."

Lexa ignores that and finally puts some distance between them, pacing toward a table with a pitcher. She gestures but Clarke shakes her head no, and Lexa doesn't pour any for herself either. 

"Octavia survived? And Bellamy?" she asks, adding when Clarke nods, "I'm glad for you. I know you care about him very much."

"Bellamy and I pulled the lever to open the vents together," Clarke says. "I can depend on him."

This time Lexa does flinch, and Clarke likes to think she hears what's unsaid -- _because you weren't there_ \-- just fine. Lexa's a smart woman. It doesn't really make Clarke feel better.

"That kind of trust is precious," Lexa says. "You should draw strength from it, not run from it."

"Like you know anything about trust." Clarke says. Lexa doesn't have the right to talk about Bellamy like she knows him. She doesn't have the right to judge what Clarke needs either.

"I trusted people who betrayed me, too, Clarke," Lexa says.

"Then you know why I don't forgive you. Are we done here?" Clarke asks, not even bothering to dignify more unasked-for advice with a second thought. 

Lexa nods, but she doesn't look happy about it. If she has more to say, she keeps it to herself. Except when Clarke turns to leave, she says in a rush, "I'm glad you came, Clarke. I'm glad you're alive."

Clarke stops and searches her face, wondering if the wistfulness she hears is real, but Lexa doesn't give anything else away. She nods in return and leaves the tent feeling hollow and unsatisfied.

* * *

Clarke strides away from Lexa's tent and through her camp, anger simmering under the surface. She wants to leave, go back to Boro's unit, but she doesn't know where the horses are. She's half tempted to walk. Instead she settles for going to the riverbank. It's not a far hike, and the tents soon give way to the marshy ground that slopes to the waters' edge, trees towering overhead. Lexa's camp is farther upstream, so the river is narrower here, but it's still calm, and right now Clarke needs calm.

She take a couple deep breaths and watches the water bubble around some boulders for a minute while she tries to regain her equilibrium. She refuses to let Lexa unsettle her.

The problem with Lexa is that she gets under Clarke's skin even when she's not there. Clarke doesn't want to acknowledge anything she said, but her words -- _why are you running away?_ \-- worm their way into her brain. 

Clarke's not running. Her people are safe, and they don't need her right now. They need to heal. She left so her people wouldn't have to live with a living reminder of the cost of their freedom, ripping their wounds open every five minutes. _Ripping her own open_. She left because she couldn't face the look in Jasper's eyes when Maya died in his arms. The countless bodies of an entire people. She bears the burden of her choices so they don't have to. _That's what a leader does_ , she thinks viciously, shutting out thoughts of Dante as quickly as they come. She's not _running away_ from anything. Leaving was the whole point, because alone is the only way Clarke knows how to live with it.

And despite the army not half a mile away, Clarke is very much alone.

She finds a dry boulder on the bank and scrambles up on top of it, letting her legs fall to either side. It's early afternoon and as the calm river soaks up her anger, Clarke feels her stomach rumble. She's hungry but doesn't want to go back to the camp. If she goes back to the camp, she'll not only have to avoid Lexa but all the other grounders too.

The story of Mount Weather has spread like wildfire, and even this morning at Boro's camp, Clarke couldn't shake the eyes on her. She's told the story three times, and it's only starting to slowly sink in -- what she told Lexa, _her story_ \-- that's what defines her now in the eyes of the grounders. That's who Clarke of the Sky People is.

Maybe they're right. She just got done telling Lexa, didn't she? Maybe all she is any more is just another murdering leader, who will do whatever it takes to keep her people alive. She's in good company.

But that girl in the story, it doesn't feel like her. She left out all the broken bits that don't fit right anymore. She left out all shards of death and fear and pain that stick out at awkward angles, jarring when they brush against the waking world. Clarke is that girl, too.

* * *

The days are short now, and it's nearly dark when Clarke returns to the camp. All her things are back at Boro's unit, so she finds herself at the fire outside Lexa's tent.

Lexa is alone, sitting on a log, her face lit up in the flickering orange firelight. Their eyes meet, and time stops. Now that she's no longer angry, for a moment all Clarke sees is another lonely girl. The moment breaks when Lexa offers her a seat beside her.

Clarke accepts, enticed more by the scent of roasting meat than Lexa's company. That's what she tells herself, when Lexa shares her dinner with her.

"Where are your guards?" she asks, after a while.

"We're not at war anymore," Lexa replies. "They're off celebrating at the main fire. I'll look after myself tonight."

"You're not celebrating with them?"

"I wasn't the one who won the war," Lexa says simply, concentrating on her food.

Clarke watches her and wonders what will happen to the alliance of the Twelve Clans now that the Mountain Men are no longer a common threat, but that already makes her head hurt with the worries that conversation would bring. Plus, she's not certain that Lexa would talk about that at all with her.

They eat, and the silence feels fragile between them.

Sitting so close together, Clarke can't help but think of sitting with Lexa while they were still planning everything. Despite everything, she misses it. Part of her wants that feeling back of sitting next to a kindred spirit.

"Winning costs a high price," Clarke says softly, her eyes turning to the hundreds upon hundreds of stars in the sky. Too many to count. "I heard the story of your people's fight against the Mountain Men last night," she goes on. "You call them two-skinned monsters."

"For the suits they wear," Lexa explains.

"And the monsters outside?" Clarke asks, smiling thinly when Lexa frowns in confusion. "We're right here." She gestures between the two of them, feeling every speck of blood on her hands. "Why don't they tell a story about that?"

Lexa is quiet for a moment, and Clarke picks at her food, suddenly not hungry. She thinks of the rabbits and small game she's killed. Their death an exchange for her continued living. It's not so different from the people she's left dead behind her.

Lexa's voice is gentle when she replies, and it's not the answer Clarke's expecting. "We all have a monster inside, Clarke. The trick is not running from it."

"I'm not running."

When she glances over, Lexa is suddenly sitting too close to her, even though she hasn't moved and there's a good two feet between them still. 

"If you weren't running, you wouldn't be here. You can't run from yourself, Clarke. You can't just survive. There has to be more. You told me that."

Clarke swallows, caught in Lexa's gaze. "Since when do you listen to me?"

"I've always listened." Lexa's voice is so soft Clarke barely hears her. There's an offer there. The attraction, the _understanding_ , despite the vacuum between them and the fight earlier, it's still there between them. In response Clarke's stomach flips over and over inside until she's not sure which way is up.

"How do I embrace a monster that killed an entire people in cold blood?" she asks.

"Because you saved _your_ people," Lexa says.

"If it was the right decision, why does it feel so wrong?"

"Because war demands hard choices. Those who can't make them, die."

Lexa's words don't make Clarke feel better, but she wasn't expecting them too. Instead, she can't help but think of her father, who couldn't just let people die in secret. He didn't survive that choice. If he'd been in the Mountain instead of Clarke, she's not sure he would have been able to find another way. She's not sure he would have been able to pull the lever, either.

"What's in your nightmares? How do you sleep at night?" Clarke asks, because Lexa might front an unflinching tough exterior, but aluminum and kevlar won't block the solar wind. Clarke understands pushing everything away until all that's left is the mission. While they were planning, fighting, Clarke kept telling herself that she could fall apart later. Only it's later now, and she doesn't know how to put herself back together again.

She's not Lexa, who can push the girl she is underneath down so far she might not even know her anymore.

But Lexa surprises her. "I had Costia," she says softly. "For a while, anyway. She held me in the night."

Clarke glances out of the corner of her eye at Lexa, who notices immediately and stares back. Clarke doesn't like what she sees in her face -- a question, a hope. It makes the churning in her stomach worse.

Clarke says nothing, and tearing her eyes away feels like wrenching them from gravity. She releases a long slow breath into the quiet and stares into the fire. She doesn't want Lexa's comfort. And not because she doesn't _want_ it. She wants arms around her, she wants someone to tell her how to fix the mess inside of her, she wants someone to tell her it will all be okay so that she believes it. Clarke's fairly certain it's an impossible wish, like wishing she could be wrapped up in her mother's arms like a little kid again, but she outgrew those arms the day her father died.

She doesn't want those arms to be Lexa's either. She couldn't bear it. 

"Will you ever forgive me?" Lexa asks.

Clarke wraps her arms around herself against the night. "I don't know."


	3. Forty Miles Give or Take

Clarke sleeps in a tent whose occupants Lexa kicks out for the night. The next morning, she starts walking toward Boro's unit and her things without waiting for an escort. No one gets in her way, and when she needs to ask directions, everyone recognizes who she is and gives her no trouble. Neither does Boro when she sees Clarke off that afternoon.

Clarke is tired. She should stay another day, but she collects her things, accepts the provisions Boro gives her, and melts into the forest.

She heads southwest. Lexa's going east with her army units peeling off home, so Clarke has to go another way. The forest is quiet, and Clarke has too much time to think as she walks forty miles up game trails back into the mountains. But moving forward keeps her thoughts moving, and for once, she doesn't hide from them. 

Seeing Lexa again cracked a dam inside, and she hears the memory of her own voice saying steadily, _I didn't give up, I ordered, I killed_ like a bird that's learned the only song it will sing for the rest of its life. Like the one she hears in the forest now as the shadows lengthen then abruptly drop over the wood as the sun disappears over the canopy.

The temperature plunges with the light, and Clarke stops and doesn't think about much of anything except finding fallen branches that will shelter her in the night. Winter is well and truly on its way. 

Later, she shivers in her small lean-to between a pair of trees, wrapped up in her two blankets with leaves and needles piled over her feet and legs for extra warmth. It's too cold to sleep, and her hands were shaking so much she couldn't start a fire.

 _Death is a strange and terrible thing_ , she thinks because she might die out here, alone, her body temperature dropping and dropping until it's too cold for her vital organs and they shut down one by one until her heart stutters to a stop.

She could die out here, and it doesn't bother her. She's not afraid. She's tired. So tired of fighting, of thinking up ways to survive. Now it's just her, and she could just let go, not get up. Death, her own potential death, could come right now, and she sits between the trees like she's watching it come from outside of her own body. It feels strange.

Strange, too, that even though her father and Wells had been ripped away from her, she forgave her mother and cried for Charlotte anyway. Atom was in so much pain that it was mercy to ease him on his way. She'd feared for her life in Anya's camp and didn't think twice about the man she killed to escape. She doesn't feel guilty about killing all those grounders at the drop ship, and the guilt she felt at shutting the door on Finn and Bellamy was only assuaged by them surviving and knowing that Bellamy would have done the same thing and understood. Her choices didn't bother her when she stood up to Quint, but she hadn't been able to pull the trigger on him. But pulling the trigger had been easy against the Mount Weather sniper. She'd been willing to risk killing Lincoln to take him out.

She's had nightmares about the people she let die in the missile attack. All the people she cares about survived, and she wakes crying over strangers. What makes it easier to accept death for some but not others?

Clarke stares up at the black sky, littered with stars she can't see through the canopy but that she knows are there, as many as the dead. 

Maybe it wasn't about who you knew, but how they died. A good death you can look in the eyes in battle, for a cause. A bad death sneaks in when you're supposed to be safe. And all you can do is forgive the killers or not. Or be a killer awaiting forgiveness. 

But who is left alive that could forgive her? No one, that's who. It doesn't matter, really. Clarke's pretty sure she couldn't handle forgiveness anyway.

* * *

Frost covers the ground in the mornings over the next week or so. Forty miles Clarke hikes uphill, and forty miles she slowly descends. She ends up napping at midday when it's warmest because she can't sleep at night. After that first night, she stops earlier so she can build a fire and shelter, but she needs to either find or build something more permanent soon if she's going to stay out in the elements much longer. She begins to miss the grounder tents. It's not until she begins to see fire scars on the trees eight days after leaving Lexa's army camp that she knows she's heading in the right direction.

She crests the ridge above Tondc by noon the next day.

Where the village stood is still a crater filled with rubble a few miles away, but fires are lit on the edges on the far side, and new structures have gone up. Just below her, Clarke can see the remains of the statue and columns from the old world still standing. _Stubborn thing_ , she thinks. Just like the grounders. _Just like her people_. It still takes her until the sun starts sinking over the treetops to reach it. 

Up close, the statue is huge, and Clarke feels tiny beside it. It's a man with a beard sitting in state in a giant chair. His features have been smoothed by wind and rain, but nevertheless he looks calm as he gazes above Clarke's head into the distance. She wonders how long ago he lived, and what he did to become immortalized in statue. She wonders if they ever learned his name in history class. _Or if the grounders still tell his story._ They had so much to cover, they usually didn't go too in depth for any one country before the nuclear age, and by the time she started her apprenticeship, she hadn't been interested in reading about ancient history for fun.

The hike to Tondc doesn't take long. No more than half an hour, and when she reaches the sentries, Clarke has barely said her name before one of them is running ahead and the other is leading her through. 

Clarke is the center of attention again as everyone stops and stares. After the organization of the army camps, the new Tondc looks in rough shape. A few crude structures have been built out of scavenged rubble, a few cut new from trees. Some have fresh hides as doors or walls, others evergreen branches thick with needles. Most of the faces she sees are warriors; they'd been with the army in the forest during the attack. Most of the civilians had been among the casualties. Still, Clarke sees a few children, a few people more plainly dressed who duck behind buildings out of sight when she passes by.

Clarke wishes they wouldn't do that. She can't stand being someone they hide from. Not that she blames them. She puts her head up, even though she feels more like hiding herself. No matter how much she should, she can't seem to ever bow her head. So many things are her fault, but she can't bring herself to try to hide from them, not from these people who have lost so much because of her. 

She's not running away. Not from herself, not from the Trigedakru. The stubborn core inside of her won't let her. She doesn't want to see Indra. She wouldn't be surprised if Indra had her strung up and tortured, but maybe that's why she feels like she _needs_ to see her. 

Indra and Clarke's relationship is uncomplicated by messy feelings. Indra will tell her the truth. If she won't condemn her for the Mountain, she will for the missile, and Clarke needs to hear it. She needs to know that her sins won't be floated away and burned up on reentry as if they never happened.

Indra is waiting for her in the cleared area around the central fire. The largest of the new buildings is nearby, and behind it, another where the noises of the sick and wounded are coming in faded voices.

"Indra," Clarke nods her head to the other woman.

"Clarke. I did not expect to see you here," she says, disapproval clear in her tone.

"I was in the area. I have news of Lincoln," Clarke offers.

"He is a traitor, and no one I want news of," Indra responds, which abruptly pisses Clarke off on Lincoln's behalf. He did everything that was asked of him, and more. He was no traitor. She feels herself straightening even more, emotion sliding off her face.

But part of Clarke is satisfied with the cold response. It's nothing less than she expected. So she nods to Indra, hyperaware of their audience. "I was wondering if I might speak with you," Clarke says next. "It won't take long, then I'll leave."

Indra gives her a look that implies Clarke is a complete moron. "We have seen how you finished this war, Clarke of the Sky People. You will be our guest until you continue your journey."

Her surprise must show on her face, but Indra doesn't have time for that either. "Come, we can talk."

* * *

Indra leads her out past the main buildings to the edge of the camp. Clarke follows, not sure where she was expecting them to go, but it isn't to a hide stretched out between two trees with sinew and flesh clinging to it in ropey strings. Nearby sits a pile of viscera in a cracked bucket with flies buzzing over it. Indra picks up a knife that is stuck point down in the earth and resumes scraping the hide.

"What is it you want to say?" she asks Clarke.

It isn't the confrontation Clarke was expecting, and she feels off balance and half-ignored. Now that her moment is here, her tongue is thick in her mouth.

"How is rebuilding going?" Clarke cops out. She just needs a moment to find the words.

"That's not what you want to say," Indra gives her another look, one laced with why-are-you-wasting-my-time.

"No." Clarke nods, and takes a breath. "I wanted to tell you about the missile. I thought you should know --"

"I know," Indra interrupts, her attention returning to her work. Her arm moves in a steady up and down, loosening the remaining flesh.

Clarke blinks a couple times, frozen in time. When she recovers herself, she's sure Indra doesn't understand what she means. "We knew that the missile attack was coming."

"I know. Your spy heard and sent a message to you," Indra repeats, impatiently.

"Octavia told you."

"Octavia didn't need to. Your people are not the only clever ones. It was not hard to work out that you and the Commander knew in advance." Indra cuts her another look full of contempt, but then floors Clarke by adding, "Commanders shouldn't apologize for decisions made in war."

"Your village was destroyed," Clarke says, flinging one hand toward the crater. "We could have evacuated. That was my fault."

"Knowing how the battle turned, would you make a different decision now?" Indra asks.

Clarke keeps her eyes open. "No."

"Then do not apologize for things you do not regret," Indra tells her sharply, her knife punctuating her words. "They cannot be undone."

Clarke opens her mouth to protest, but shuts it again at the glare Indra levels at her. She watches in silence as Indra returns to scraping the hide. The piece of flesh she's working on finally falls into the dirt; Indra bends and tosses it in the cracked bucket with the rest, then starts on the next, the shush shush of her knife the only noise. Her forearm is flexed, visible where her sleeve rides up, the muscle strong and sure in its movements.

"I thought you'd be angry," Clarke says after a while.

"The war is done. I don't have time to be angry at things I can't fix," Indra says. "This," she nods at the skin, "rebuilding. This is what must be done next."

"Like the war never happened?" Clarke says bitterly, feeling her crimes being brushed aside.

"Don't be stupid," Indra glares at her again. "We all carry the marks of this war. It will not be lost from memory anytime soon."

 _A big hole in the ground is hard to miss,_ Clarke supposes. The Aisgedakru are still telling stories about the Fire Lake. 

"But living with our past hurts is different from living in them," Indra continues. "Ignoring what's in front of you only leads to a short life."

Lexa had said something similar after Finn's death, but Indra's words catch inside of Clarke. Living inside her hurt -- more like her hurt lives inside of her, always there, always pressing against her breastbone, reminding Clarke of the weight of death she carries. She can't escape. She doesn't know how. The only time she has come close since walking away from Camp Jaha was when she was helping Meara with the wounded. She could push through her pain for theirs.

She watches Indra scrape the hide. Four more pieces end up in the cracked bucket. She watches the muscles of Indra's arms flex, and this time sees the gnarled scars on her skin, as ropey as the sinew she's pulling free. Past battles, past wounds. Clarke wonders how many past hurts are told through the marks on her body. If that's what she means by living with them, scar tissue buffering the raw wound underneath.

She loses time watching Indra work. Her own thumb runs up and down the long straight scar on her inner forearm.

"We could have lived in peace with them," Clarke says softly.

Indra snorts, dropping more sinew into the cracked bucket. "If you thought that, you wouldn't have killed them all," she says, with a quick glance Clarke's way before raising her knife again. "It takes two sides to make peace, and as long as we were animals to them, they would never bend."

Clarke watches her scrape the last of the flesh from the hide.

* * *

Clarke gets free range of Tondc. Indra doesn't set her any guards, and while someone is always watching when she wanders off on her own, no one follows her. Like Indra, they're all busy with something -- building a new structure, clearing more rubble to recover what they can from the village buried underneath, preparing more food and supplies. 

Not wanting to get in anyone's way, Clarke quickly finds herself on the edges of activity, feeling like a ghost who doesn't know where to fit in. But one group catches her eye, a group of four men sitting off to the side around a woman. They're in rough shape, skinnier than most of their frames suggest they should be. Their faces are scarred and thin, and Clarke can't quite put her finger on the edginess she senses from them. She's about to move on when she sees that the woman is bent over another man in the center of the group who is lying facedown on a blanket with his shirt off in the cold air. She's tapping something into his skin. A tattoo.

The man on the ground already has a tattoo, faded and wide at the base of his back, tapering into a dashed stripe up either side of his spine. The woman is adding curved flares out to either side with jagged edges. It's just an outline right now, and Clarke wonders if it will be filled in.

She wonders what this tattoo means, layered over the old one, whether it conveys rank or status. They don't look like the kind of warriors who earned status during a war they barely fought in. These men look like they were chewed up and spit out the other side. Like they did fight long and hard and survived. 

That's when she realizes who the men gathered around must be. Reapers, captured in the tunnels. Like Lincoln, they've been brought back from their drug-induced madness.

The woman works steadily. No one says anything when Clarke crouches to watch a little way away, unable to take her eyes from the steady growth of the line across the former reaper's back. She doesn't know what it means but it's like watching wings grow, rough and imperfect. Like something new growing out of the ashen remains of the older marks. Like a memory of something new. These men have survived their worst selves to come home.

* * *

That night what feels like the entire village crams inside the larger of the two new buildings. Clarke knows it can't be everyone, but it feels like it. She would escape outside but it started snowing not long after sunset, and it's cold out there. The hunt of the day is roasting over the fire, smelling delicious, and it's not long before she's being passed a stick with a hunk of meat speared on it.

As she's grown accustomed to in grounder camps, after the meal, the storytelling begins. It's the same story she's heard before, except this time no one offers to translate. But Clarke has heard it enough times that she follows well enough, the odd word here and there jumping out as one she recognizes. Thossus, his army, and the missile. His searching spirit. Castus and his best warriors becoming reapers -- a hiss goes around the room at that point, startling and scary in its intensity -- and the death of his son. His spirit broken and lost until it finds a worthy successor. Lexa and the unification of the Twelve Clans. Her spirit strong and unwavering.

Then, the finger from the sky tracing an arc to the ground. The arrival of Klark.

Her heart hammering, this time, Clarke stays and listens, ignoring the eyes turned her way every other word. She doesn't catch the details, but she figures out when their flares burned down a village in an accidental act of war, when Raven's bomb blew up the bridge, when she and Finn were captured, escaped, and finally when she led her people in battle with a surprise weapon that destroyed three hundred warriors and angered the two-skinned monsters.

She has to close her eyes when the storyteller mimes the massacre at Tondc and she hears someone crying in the crowd. She opens them when she hears her name again, along with _heda_ and realizes that the storyteller is at the part where she seals the alliance with Finn's death. 

Clarke is crying too by then, silent tears that don't seem to stop, like the sadness is overflowing. People are looking, and Clarke ignores them as hard as she can, but it's difficult. She can't stop the tears and they all know it's for the murderer and not the murdered, but he was her friend, her love, her stupid broken heart. 

She's surprised when they remember Bellamy being sent in as a spy through the reaper tunnels, though she doesn't hear his name, but she recognizes Octavia's, said with some pride and a cautious glance toward Indra, who doesn't react. She's the hero of the next bit, the second missile, when Octavia rallies the rescue efforts.

Then it's on to the Mountain, and Clarke gets lost in the storyteller's words without many accompanying gestures. But suddenly, every eye in the audience is on her, and the storyteller, staring right at her, repeats in English, "Tell us, Klark of the Sky People. Tell us how you defeated the Mountain."

Clarke shouldn't be surprised, isn't really, but the question comes so abruptly that she finds herself tongue-tied for a good moment before she has the presence of mind to wipe her eyes and straighten up. This is the part of the story that hasn't spread yet. Her story. _Their_ story, she thinks fiercely. Bellamy and Monty and Jasper and Maya and Harper and Miller and all the rest, they survived it, together.

Facing her audience of grounders -- _Trigedakru_ \-- she tells them. And this time, after so many recitations, she hears the strength in her own voice as she speaks, like she's telling the story about someone else. Another leader who threatened Dante and Cage, another survivor who told Monty to figure out how to let the poison air into level five to stop the madness, another girl who asked Bellamy for another way, then pulled the lever when there wasn't one.

When Clarke finishes her story, a hush falls over the whole assembly. 

Her eyes drift to the knot of former reapers. Her mind whirring in what if's -- what if the Mountain Men had made it out alive, her people dead, theirs able to live on the surface. What if Lexa made good her calculated promise to slaughter them as soon as they left their stone walls. The Mountain Men would have been badly outnumbered; they would have had to keep the reapers -- or made more -- if they had any chance of surviving. An endless kidnapping and horror show of turning the strongest grounder warriors against their own.

The former reapers sit apart from the rest, a good foot between them and their closest neighbors despite everyone else being cozy. They've come home but they haven't been welcomed back with open arms. Their sins still stand against them. But then she sees one of their closest neighbors pass them a wine skin.

Maybe what matters most is that they're here.

"Did Lincoln survive?" Someone breaks into her thoughts from across the fire. Nyko. Clarke remembers when he was ready to kill Lincoln for a lost cause.

"Yes." She answers without thinking about it, but then frowns. "I thought you didn't care."

"He made his choice. He is dead to us." Indra says from Clarke's left. She seems perfectly content to leave it at that, but something in her voice, something quiet and sad, prompts Clarke to fill in the empty space left open by the question.

"He survived. Octavia too. Inside the mountain, Octavia fought well, like a warrior." Clarke's not sure what else to add, but Indra's looking at her now. "You taught her well. By the time Lincoln joined us, it was done. But he caught their leader who escaped outside in the confusion. Lincoln met him in the woods just outside the doors. 

"When he saw Lincoln, he tried to control him like a reaper, using the tone generator, but Lincoln was stronger. He cut him down. First his hand, then with the Red he was trying to use against Lincoln. We saw the body afterward. He'll never hurt anyone again."

That sends a pleased murmur through the crowd, and Clarke watches the former reapers, sees them grin.

"Then vengeance was served by the hand that bore it," Indra says over everyone. The crowd nods in approval, and Clarke finds herself doing the same.

Cage was the one person in the mountain that she doesn't regret is dead. His death felt like a balance on the scales, and even thinking on it now, Clarke feels the weight of it settle, not like a burden, but into place. "Justice, too," she says. 

Her own voice carries the words, but Clarke hears the memory of Echo saying them in her head. The scars upon her body. Cage died too easily for the sins he committed. Maybe that's why the rest of them had to die, too.

* * *

Snow is nothing like Clarke has ever known. In the morning everything is blanketed in white, and it's so beautiful she almost can't stand it. Beautiful and cold, delicate to the touch.

Its beauty doesn't last long, however, because soon the light footprints are ground into muddy tracks between buildings, tents, and the crater as everyone continues the work of rebuilding. The white snow becomes a mottled gray and brown. The sun comes out by late morning, and by early afternoon half the snow has melted away, leaving only traces in white humps dotting slopes or patches of shade.

Clarke finds herself staring at it when she's not busy herself. Sitting on the side while there's work to be done has never been Clarke's style, and she offered to help Nyko with the everyday injuries that happen when people are rebuilding their village and preparing for winter. 

She spends the morning following him around, helping grind leaves and mushrooms into powders. She asks the occasional question about what he uses to make his medicines, and he tells her, but mostly they work in a comfortable silence. 

In the afternoon, Nyko leads her to the second main building to check on the former reapers. Twenty are in Tondc. Not all of them went home to their own villages. Not all of the other clans were willing to take them. Even in Tondc, while they may be welcome at the evening fire, they sleep separately from everyone else, where their nightmares and twitching won't harm anyone else.

"We've lost a third of the ones we captured in the tunnels," Nyko says as Clarke takes it all in. The smell of unwashed bodies is strong. Some of the men are curled up away from the door. One or two let out eerie moans that are hard to listen to. Everyone who can be up working is. These are the ones whose recovery has been the hardest. 

"The shock of losing the Red. Their hearts stopped, like Lincoln's. Or they managed to take their own lives." 

"Were our doctors able to help you?" Clarke asks.

"They held up their end of the bargain before they left. They gave us one of your electric batons." Nyko leads her forward to the closest man on the ground who is passed out and twitching in his sleep. His hair has been cut away showing a dozen healing cuts across his scalp and face in rows of three or four -- fingernail scratches. 

"He says he feels his skin crawling," Nyko says when he sees where Clarke is looking. "His name is Totten. He was a strong warrior once. He lived in a village north of here that we celebrate the winter tree-star with. I didn't recognize him until he came out of his rage after the first week and asked for his lover, who we all knew. He's been dead five years now, dead trying to find Totten here. Descended into the tunnels only to return in well-chewed pieces. We all know the story. We haven't told Totten yet. He was strong, but now he is a shell of who he was. I don't know if he'll recover himself."

"Lincoln did," Clarke says.

"Lincoln was a reaper for a week before he died and your healer brought him back," Nyko says. He checks the most recent scratches on Totten's body, puts some balm on them, and moves on.

The next is a young man who is so thin he's practically a skeleton. His eyes are huge in his gaunt face, black in the firelight as they land unnervingly on Clarke.

"Pont, one of Cle's boys. Since he woke up from the worst of the Red, he won't eat," Nyko says softly to Clarke as he crouches.

"You're the one who brought down the mountain," Pont says, eyes fixing on her face and surprising her. Despite telling her story last night, she doesn't expect him to recognize her.

"Yes."

"You broke Castus's curse. Bet they never expected that."

It takes a moment for Clarke to figure out what he means, and when she does, she freezes, caught in the black black of his eyes. He smiles at her. It's well meant, grateful maybe, but it's too big for his thin face. Clarke musters up a smile for him in return. Nyko starts bullying him to eat something.

 _How many?_ she wonders while they talk, her heart jumping with the memory of Finn's hair on her cheek, his last breath in her ear. _How many of his loved ones did this reaper reap? How many did he recognize at the time? How many has he just realized are dead by his hand?_

She knows it doesn't matter. She knows how many are too many. One is too many. But she can't help but think that now she would count the reaper himself as the first victim.

Some of the men are in worse shape than others. As they work, Clarke listens to Nyko tell her their names, answers their questions, if they have any. All of them know who she is. 

The work is a good distraction until it's no longer a distraction and just work. With her hands in motion, Clarke's thoughts still churn, but something has shifted inside of her. As she trails behind Nyko back outside to replenish supplies, then help stitch up another cut left by a slipped knife in the glittering sunshine, she ends up thinking about Cage and Dante and the choices _they_ made. Choices she couldn't change. To take these men and turn them against their own people. To take her friends, lie to them, experiment, harvest and kill them. She didn't have any control over that.

The tight knot that's been sitting in the center of her gut since she walked out of the Mountain starts to feel less like a knot.

Maybe it's the snow, maybe it was telling the story last night, maybe it's hearing the grounders' stories today. Maybe it was Clarke waking up that morning tired of being tired. Maybe it was because she slept among fifty other people, hearing their breathing and snoring in a one-room building, and she couldn't see her dead littered among the stars.

* * *

Clarke can see Mount Weather from the hills above Tondc. The same hills where the she killed the sniper with no regret. She started out that morning looking for mushrooms and moss, but kept going when she recognized the trail.

Below, the new village is a small hive of activity beside the enormous crater, new life growing out of destruction. If the crater fills with water, Clarke wonders what they will name this new lake.

Off in the distance, Mount Weather is a peak among other peaks. From here it is as distant and cold as it's always been. How much has it changed in the past month since Clarke left it in ruin? Part of her doesn't want to know.

But the part of her that came back to Tondc for Indra's judgement needs to know. Like pushing at a loose tooth or picking at a scab, Clarke can't stop thinking about it.

These are the people she murdered. She has to face them.

* * *

The hike takes two days. Moving keeps the cold at bay, but Clarke barely sleeps during the night and gives up after she feels rested enough to go on. Forty miles, give or take, one foot in front of the other. Once she's on the move, everything else falls away.

In their stories, the grounders call the Mountain Men two-skinned monsters to frighten their children. While they were fighting, it was easier to think of them that way, too. But the closer she gets to Mount Weather, the more Clarke thinks of them the way she last saw them. People in dry brittle clothes, old ladies and withered old men who'd never seen the sun, kids who had been playing ball, young men and women who just wanted to see the ground. 

Clarke grew up in a can. She knows what it feels like to be under pressure, dependent on the walls around you for protection, life, safety. She thought she knew what it meant to choose between who lives and who dies.

But the reality of that choice is nothing like she thought it would be. There's no satisfaction of having made the decision that's best for everyone. No certainty. Only tears and doubt until you run out of both, like a corpse drained of blood.

But Clarke isn't a corpse. Her blood is pounding in her ears as she hikes up and up and up to the reaper tunnels, then ducks out of the wind and finds her way to the blackest dark she's ever been in. She stops at the entrance, out of the wind kicked up by dawn's arrival.

She's been here before, but staring into the nothingness of the tunnel, Clarke is overcome by the sudden certainty that she doesn't know what's waiting for her.

Yet she refuses to be afraid. After all, the scariest thing in the darkness of Mount Weather is her.

* * *

Walking the halls is like walking in a tomb. Clarke makes a torch from her blankets and a stick. Its light is a small flickering bubble that surrounds her, holds her, keeps her apart from her empty surroundings. 

Clarke takes the stairs to level five, the same stairs she'd once nearly escaped through. The blanket smells as it burns, but the smell when she opens the door to the level is worse -- stale air from a dead ventilation system does nothing to hide the putrid scent of nearly four hundred rotting corpses.

Because she's moving in a bubble of light, she can only see the bodies one at a time. In the memory burned into her dreams, she sees rows upon rows, the uncountable dead. Now instead of a mass, she sees an old woman in a faded blue sweater that hangs off her frame. Dark spots dot where the lesions bled through. She passes a soldier wearing the faded white and khaki uniform whose cap has fallen untidily to the side. She stops at the body of a girl wrapped up in the arms of a woman who must be her mother. She's so small, maybe nine or ten years old.

Unbidden, words she's barely thought about in months come to mind. 

"In peace, may you leave the shore. In love may you find the next," she whispers to the dead little girl, knowing as she says it that there was nothing peaceful about her death. She was thrown into this room to escape death and instead death found her.

Clarke's eyes close but the tears leak out the corners, and she doesn't know if she's crying for the little girl or for herself.

* * *

The worst part about being on level five inside Mount Weather is the silence. Clarke isn't expecting the only sound she hears to be her own footfalls as she carefully makes her way from the kitchen end of the mess to the main corridor.

The dead are in disarray. About halfway across the room, she comes across a clearer space encircled by dead soldiers. This is where Maya died, Clarke remembers, though her body is not there. Jasper buried her outside because he wanted her to see the ground, even if only in death.

Clarke doesn't remember where they buried her, and she doesn't have time to think because then she hears the second most terrifying sound inside level five -- someone else's footsteps.

Her gun is in her hand and aimed toward the main corridor by the time the light from their flashlight rounds the door and glares into Clarke's eyes.

"Don't move," she says, aiming for the light.

"You're not the only one with a weapon," says the man in front of her. Clarke recognizes his voice. Carl Emerson. She can just make out the shape of his head through the glare. He has a semi-automatic rifle aimed at her, but what she notices is that the light wavers, like the hand that's holding it is trembling.

"I should kill you." The anger is easy to hear in his voice. Clarke is half-expecting the bullet to follow, but they're at an impasse. Whoever fires first wins.

Still, Clarke asks, "Why don't you?" She's unexpectedly calm about the prospect of dying. She should be afraid, but she's not.

"What are you doing here?" he asks in return. "If you've come to finish us off. Don't bother. I'm the only one left."

"I didn't come to kill you. I wasn't expecting anyone to be here." She doesn't know what she was expecting really. She thought that seeing the dead would cut deep, would bring her to her knees, finally break her in all the ways that she feels like she needs to be broken. All the guilt and shame and self-loathing brought to a frothy boil until she drowned in it.

Except she's the one standing with her gun trained steadily on another person, a cold calculation in the back of her head that knows she can drop Emerson before he can drop her. She can do it. She will if she has to.

"Anyone alive, you mean." Emerson's light dips, his hands shifting on his weapon.

"I'm sorry I killed them," Clarke says.

"Sorry? You murdered them. My friends, my family." Emerson's voice breaks and he pauses. Clarke feels her eyes sting as tears well up, but her arm doesn't waver. Before she can say anything, Emerson continues, his voice carefully controlled. "You murdered the only civilization left on this planet. We just wanted to leave this place and go outside. We were going to build a better world. You ruined that."

He's going to shoot. She's sure of it. The judgement she wants is in his hands.

Clarke doesn't want to die; she's not suicidal. But how do you atone for genocide? Especially one you'd commit again. Even surrounded by the dead themselves as a stark reminder of how far she's willing to go. Clarke will cross every line, ignore every moral argument, because the only thing worse than dying is watching the people she loves die.

She's capable of monstrous things. But at his words, staring at the light that's hiding his face, rage is what bubbles up from somewhere deep inside.

"You were murdering _my_ friends, _my family_ ," Clarke says sharply, holding onto her anger with a fierce grip. She stalks closer, the heat from the torch she still holds brushes the top of her head. "Civilization? What a joke. You didn't have to kill them to get what you needed! We could have helped you! We just wanted to live in peace. If you were in my place, what would you have done?"

"Made the sacrifice!"

"I did!" Clarke's words ring loudly in the huge dark hall. They take her by surprise, but settle easily, even as the familiar burn of shame and guilt and broken pieces jostle inside of her. She'll never be clean of any of it. But that's who she is now. It hurts, and it's terrible, but that's who she is now.

Emerson makes a pained noise, and Clarke is throwing herself to the side before it properly registers. Bang! goes a single bullet past her. She drops her torch, twists, finds the light, aims low, and fires twice. Emerson goes down, and Clarke is up and kicking his gun away before he recovers.

The light is terrible -- her torch is flickering ten feet away and his flashlight has rolled and is pointing in the opposite direction. Clarke grabs it and looks at the damage.

"Get away from me!" Emerson scrambles back as best he can. Clarke nailed his leg and winged his right bicep.

"I can help you." She doesn't give him room to complain, already reaching to stop the bleeding on his leg. Clarke's mind whirs into doctor mode. He'll need a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, and she's already reaching for the closest fabric when he pushes at her.

"You've done enough," Emerson says. "Just go. Leave."

"No." Clarke shoves him back. Whether he wants her to or not, she's going to make sure he doesn't bleed out right here, right now. She ends up taking shoelaces from the closest soldier's boot, then sterilizing her knife in the torch flame and digging out her bullet.

Emerson doesn't fight again and lets her. He screams when Clarke touches the knife to the wound, and suddenly she's back in the control room, watching their doctors drill and drill and drill. She feels sick, knowing what she must do. She sees Monty's face. She tries to find another answer in Bellamy's. But there's nothing else to do, and he knows it too. Her hand is on the lever. She's going to do it. She has done it. She will do it.

She inhales and digs the bullet out of Emerson's leg as quickly as she can while he curses and holds back another scream.

She exhales when it's done, the bullet dropped on the floor between them. She heats her knife again, and this time holds it against his flesh to cauterize the wound. Emerson screams again, and Clarke feels the ghost of Bellamy's hand over hers. They pull the lever.

* * *

Emerson will live. Clarke patches him up with hands that hold both death and life. He watches her with an uncanny glare, and Clarke wonders why he hasn't tried to kill her again. His knife is on his belt, but he never tries to draw it. Clarke doesn't take it away.

"You should have killed me," he says, when they part. She's leaving him in a dark room on level four where he's apparently been camping out. From the scatter of supplies she sees, he's mostly been surviving on food stores but they're running low. He's ventured out to hunt. It's sad really, when Clarke looks around. Emerson can survive outside, _whose blood did he steal_ , but he comes back here every night.

In the weak light cast by battery-powered lamps, long shadows make the space seem smaller than it is. None of the cramped feeling of the bunker, it's a proper room, and Clarke can't help but think that another person should be coming through the door at any moment. She wonders if this was always Emerson's home, if he had a spouse and family that once lived with him here. And now he's completely alone.

Clarke doesn't know how to feel about that. Someone to pity was the last thing she expected to find in this place.

"I'm tired of killing," Clarke tells him. She takes one of his flashlights without asking and leaves the Mountain.

* * *

After a night out of the wind in the tunnels, Clarke emerges into the sunlight the next morning and knows where she's going. 

Snow fell during the night, and the slope down the Mountain is blanketed in another three inches of white. Clarke wraps her remaining blanket around her for extra warmth, and lets her footfalls be the first to mess up the smooth surface. She goes slowly so she doesn't fall, but she's not in a hurry.

She's not sure what she is. She thought she was looking for judgement, a weighing of the scattered pieces of her soul that would bring her some kind of peace. What she found is that the pieces are still broken, but maybe they are shifting around into a new arrangement.

The dead are still dead. Clarke still killed them. The monster inside has made itself a little more comfortable inside her chest.

The one thing Clarke's sure of is that she doesn't want to be Emerson, alone in the dark, living inside his hurts. So she sets off down down down into the valley.

It's an eight hour hike, longer in the snow, some forty miles before she sleeps. Her legs are strong from walking, they don't tire. Her feet are accustomed to the bruising pace and are numbed by the cold. Clarke walks. She's not sure what she'll find when she gets there, or if the familiar faces will be any more familiar to her than her own, but she keeps going anyway, because she's faced her dead and now it's time to face the living.

She walks.

She hears Camp Jaha before she sees it, and when she emerges from the trees on the same hill that Lexa set her camp a lifetime ago, she looks across the dip and sees a hive of activity. The gates are open, crews are out amongst the trees, and a single wooden structure has been added to the camp, with a second under construction. Her people are rising from the ashes.

For a moment, Clarke's tempted to slip back into the forest and disappear. _No one's going to want her here._ But then a cry goes up -- she's been seen -- and it's too late to turn back now.

Heads turn toward her. The work crew in the forest, accompanied by two of the Guard, are closest, and among them is an unmistakeable shaggy head of hair. Bellamy.

Blocking out everyone else, Clarke focuses on him and walks. It takes him a moment, but she sees the instant he recognizes her, and then he's dropping his axe and running toward her.

Smiling hasn't felt easy until now.

"Clarke!" He slows when he gets forty feet away, a little stunned, a little out of breath.

"Hi." Clarke closes the distance, and he does too, and then he's _there_. She has half a second's warning before he's wrapping her up in his arms, strong and warm, holding her tight, and Clarke finally feels _home_.

"You're back."

"I'm back."

Bellamy lets go and drinks her in, a smile hovering around his mouth. If Clarke had any doubt that she was welcome here, the happiness on his face dispels it.

"I'm still messed up," she warns him. "I'm not sure I'll ever be all right again."

"We're all messed up," Bellamy says. "But we get each other through. Are you staying?"

Clarke lets out a long breath, feeling the fractured pieces inside shift around again, settle into something that maybe feels a little like hope. She nods. "Yeah. I'm staying."


End file.
